Old-School: In the Classroom With Mr. Chips and Miss Dove

Timeless lessons on virtue and etiquette are best learned from teachers who raise the bar for their students.

“Country Schoolhouse, 1879,” by Morgan Weistling, 2010. Oil on canvas, 44 inches by 60 inches. 2010 Patron's Choice Award from the Autry National Heritage Museum show "Masters of the American West." Courtesy of Morgan Weistling

In 1934, James Hilton’s short novel, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” became a bestseller both in England and in the United States. Readers fell in love with this story of an English schoolmaster Arthur Chipping, his short romance and marriage before his wife dies in childbirth, and his positive influence on the boys in his classes over many decades of teaching. “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” became a Hollywood film in 1939 and then, as a musical, 30 years later.

Frances Gray Patton’s 1954 “Good Morning, Miss Dove” told a similar story of a teacher’s impact on her students. The setting is the early 1950s’ fictional American town of Liberty Hill, where the “terrible Miss Dove,” an elementary school geography teacher, becomes a living legend for the discipline she exercises in her classroom. Like Hilton’s novel, “Good Morning, Miss Dove” was picked up by Hollywood (in 1955) and was a box-office success.

Correctly described by reviewers as sentimental, though without being saccharine or emotionally overblown, these two stories convey some insights into the teaching arts, their impact on students, and the culture from those now bygone days.

Miss Dove: ‘The First Duty of a Teacher’

When readers fell in love with the story of English schoolmaster Arthur Chipping, “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” became a Hollywood film in 1939 starring Robert Donat. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

During his interview for teacher at Brookfield, a boarding school for boys, Chipping is told by the headmaster, “Take a firm attitude from the beginning—that’s the secret of it.” Chips, as he is nicknamed by the boys, follows that advice, assumes the role of a disciplinarian, and operates his classes with little difficulty. Years later, he marries a much younger woman, Katherine, who tones down his tough standards of order, a change which transforms him into the “Mr. Chips” fondly remembered by so many of the school’s “old boys” well into their own adulthood.

At 19, Miss Dove is on the crest of a romance when her father drops dead of a heart attack. After learning that he has “borrowed” a considerable sum of money from the bank where he was employed, she vows to replace the embezzled funds by working as a geography teacher in Liberty Hill’s elementary school. With fortitude and self-discipline as her mainstays, she provides for her mother, oversees and finances the education of her two sisters, and, after many years, squares the accounts with the bank.

To her classroom, Miss Dove brings a special brand of discipline. “All in all, in bearing and clothing and bony structure, Miss Dove suggested that classic portrait of the eternal teacher.” What is more, she brought that portrait to life through her rectitude and high expectations. She demanded and gave respect, she insisted on manners and even correct posture from her students, she believed in the efficacy of rules and saw that they were enforced. She taught the town’s children geography for all six of their elementary school years and so imprinted on them a code of standards which, as some of them later explicitly discovered, would carry them through life’s roughest waters.

Tradition

As they age, both Mr. Chips and Miss Dove cast a gimlet eye on some of the modern methods of pedagogy.

Jennifer Jones plays the “terrible Miss Dove,” an elementary school geography teacher, in the 1955 film “Good Morning, Miss Dove.” 20th Century Fox

After Mr. Chips has become something of a Brookfield institution, Ralston, a new headmaster who is “efficient, ruthless, ambitious,” attempts to force retirement on Chips: “You haven’t been pulling your weight here. Your methods of teaching are slack and old-fashioned.” Later in the conversation, Ralston says, “You live too much in the past, and not enough in the present and the future. ... Modern parents are beginning to demand something more for their three years’ school fees than a few scraps of language that nobody speaks.”

Fortunately for the school, the boys—and Chips—it is Ralston who eventually leaves Brookfield.

Miss Dove’s stern but just governance of her classes could also rile up resistance among parents. “Occasionally a group of progressive mothers would contemplate organized revolt. ‘She’s been teaching too long,’ they would cry. ‘Her pedagogy hasn’t changed since we were in Cedar Grove. She rules the children through fear!’” They would nominate the boldest among them [to speak with Miss Dove on their behalf]. “‘You go,’ they would say. ‘You go talk to her!’” Even on entering Miss Dove’s classroom, however, this emissary “would begin to feel—though she wore her handsomest tweeds and perhaps a gardenia for courage—that she was about ten years old and her petticoat was showing.”

What Ralston missed in his criticism of Mr. Chips, and these mothers in their appraisal of Miss Dove, were the gifts bestowed on them and on their children via that vintage pedagogy. Premier among these were the virtues.

Character Builders

Mr. Chips counsel and kindness earn him the affection and respect of the boys in his class. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

His long and deeply affectionate association with Brookfield, his counsel, and his kindness earn Chips the affection and respect of the boys in his charge. During the World War I, by which time he has retired from teaching, the headmaster asks him to return to his duties: “You’d help to hold things together.” In that capacity he continues, with a light touch, to model certain virtues for the students. During an aerial bombardment near the school, for instance, he instructs a Latin class to read a passage from Caesar about the Germans at war, which brings laughter and also demonstrates courage under fire.

Miss Dove’s lessons in geography are accompanied by much more explicit training in such virtues as fortitude and wisdom. The bar she sets for achievement is high, her tolerance for misbehavior, shoddy work, and indifference low. Given that the children have her throughout elementary school, these standards become embedded in many of them, even when they don’t realize it.

We learn the stories of several of these former students and their links with the “terrible Miss Dove,” one of whom is Thomas Baker. He first appears in the novel as a young physician summoned to examine Miss Dove after she is stricken with pain and partial paralysis in her classroom.

During World War II, having helped rescue some of his shipmates after a battle at sea, Thomas had floated on a raft for days with only a canteen of water before he was rescued. In a letter to his brother Randy describing this ordeal, which Randy shares with the class, Baker wrote of the “fishy stare [Miss Dove] used to give us when we needed a drink of water. So to make my supply hold out I played I was back in the geography room. And even after the water was gone I kept playing. I’d think, ‘The bell is bound to ring in a few minutes. You can last a little longer.’ It took the same kind of guts in the Pacific it did in school.”

The Essentials Always Matter

The inside of an American schoolhouse, in Shelby County, Iowa in 1941. National Archives. Public Domain

Teachers like Miss Dove and Mr. Chips may seem as distant from contemporary America as ancient Rome, idealized anachronisms and therefore unreal. That impression would be mistaken. My third-grade teacher, Miss Sadie Fleming of Boonville Elementary School, who was born in the first decade of the 20th century, was very much my Miss Dove, while a history professor, Ed Burrows of Guilford College, served as a Mr. Chips in my life.

And no matter the changes in education and culture, the basic needs of the young have remained the same. Children and teenagers—and adults, for that matter—still function best in an atmosphere of order. Whether self-imposed or provided by outside authority, discipline is still key to most of our successes. Moreover, many parents and teachers know or have rediscovered that the old, time-tried ways of learning, like memorizing the times tables or reading classic literature, still work best for most students. Most importantly, like Miss Dove and Mr. Chips, they understand that a true education involves absorbing points of virtue, etiquette, and other basics of our civilization.

Time has transformed our methods of passing along the essentials for living a good life, but the essentials themselves remain unchanged, largely because human nature itself remains unchanged. This is the most important lesson we learn sitting in the classrooms of Mr. Chips and Miss Dove.

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