Goodbye, Mr. Chips

Brookfield, the fictional boys’ school that provides Chips with his longtime home, belongs to a small, select number of fee-charging boarding schools known in England as public schools. Unlike the public schools of the US, the British versions are privately run, often with an endowment, and have no affiliation with the state school systems. The term “public” derives from their tradition of admitting mostly nonlocal students, occasionally from other parts of the British Empire, whose patrician families can afford their residential fees. Primarily for students between the ages of 13 and 18, public schools have a long and prestigious history in England, with three of the most famous (Eton, Harrow, and Rugby) dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries. Exclusively for wealthy male students for most of their history, public schools were for many years virtually synonymous with the British ruling class and the Empire’s richest families, who maintained long legacy student traditions at certain schools, though the past century has brought more diversity to their student bodies. Their curricula, once narrowly focused on classical studies (Mr. Chips’s specialty), have also expanded a great deal.

Culturally, socially, and politically, the public school was for many decades the primary bellwether of the English national character. Beginning in the 19th century, due largely to the sweeping reforms of Thomas Arnold (1795-1842) at Rugby, the public school “ethos” (a patrician code of behavior, morality, speech, and appearance) largely set the tone for civilized Britain and its empire. Though a relatively small segment of Britain’s educated class, public school graduates wielded a vastly disproportionate influence in British government and the world.

Chips’s school, the fictional “second ranked” Brookfield, is hardly in the same class as Eton or Rugby, but like them, it draws its students mostly from the wealthy classes and boasts an illustrious “old-boy” network of alumni who are aristocrats and government leaders; one of these, Sir John Rivers (the chairman of the Board of Governors), lends Chips crucial support in his clash with the new headmaster, Ralston. By the late 19th century, with the ascendancy of the nouveau riche, the landed gentry lost much of its stranglehold on the public schools, which began to admit more sons of wealthy industrialists and merchants as well as some less privileged students. Chips reflects wryly that Ralston has built his career (and Brookfield’s future) around the former, advertising the school to England’s nouveau riche families as an industry-friendly alternative to Eton or Harrow. Ralston’s snobbish, single-minded pursuit of the leaders of new wealth, instead of an “inclusive democracy of duke and dustman” (43), disgusts Chips, and Ralston’s insistence that the classics department abandon the traditional “ecclesiastical” pronunciation of Latin for the new “restored” style confounds Chips.

By the turn of the 20th century, a classical education, once the cornerstone of a young gentleman’s upbringing, had dwindled in importance in the machine age. As Ralston pointedly reminds Chips, “Times are changing, whether you realize it or not. Modern parents are beginning to demand something more […] than a few scraps of languages that nobody speaks” (43). Ralston is right in that the meaning of education had indeed changed, even for the privileged classes, who once required little more from their schools than lessons in “gentlemanly” conduct and a few Latin quotes to signal their sophistication. Luckily for Chips, however, his warmth and humor have endeared him to many highly placed “old boys,” and he long outlasts Ralston at Brookfield.