Goodbye Mr Chips Analysis

The theme of Goodbye, Mr. Chips is to have loved and lost is better than to have never loved at all. When Mr. Chips began his career, “…he aimed to be loved, honored, and obeyed- but obeyed at any rate” (Hilton, 19). When he met his wife, her perspective was different than that of his own upbringing, and when she shared her ideas with him, she shared them in a way that made him want to listen and change his views. He began to feel a love for his students, and with that, a desire to become familiar with the faces that sat in his classroom every day. “Obedience he had secured, and honor had been granted him; but only now came love. The sudden love of boys for a man who was kind without being soft, who understood them well enough, but not too much, and whose private happiness linked them with their own” (19). The conversations that he had with Kathie gave him ideas and thoughts he would not have encountered on his own. Her youth brought an excitement to the conversation, and he began to grow in wisdom, for he realized that even if he did not support what she said, he listened and absorbed it anyway. Her fervent love for England eventually began to rub off on Chips himself, “…giving him an outlook far beyond the roofs and turrets of Brookfield, so that he saw his country as something deep and

Mr. Chips was a teacher who recognized there was plenty to be learned from his students, just as they recognized there was plenty to be learned from him. Just as he had taken new ideas from Katherine when he thought he would never understand the generations below him, the students he taught began to buy into the things he taught them as well. “Yes, he still had ‘em- those ideas of dignity and generosity that were becoming increasingly rare in a frantic world. And he thought: Brookfield will take them, too, from me; but it wouldn’t from anyone else”