I was channel-surfing the other day and caught "Goodbye Mr. Chips," the 1939 movie (lord, what a year for film!) starring Robert Donat as a teacher looking back over his life. It gets a little treacly at times, but it's still a very watchable treatise on what people thought about education nearly 70 years ago. It's also a movie without a villain, unless you count time, which eventually takes everything away from all of us.
One line in the film struck me. A new headmaster comes in and unwisely suggests that Chips retire, since he refuses to change his curriculum or teaching methods to meet "modern times." Chips' answer seems as relevant today as it did in the pre-World War I days of England in which the movie is set. Students need to leave school with two things to make it in the world, the same two things they have always needed and always will, "a sense of humor and a sense of proportion." Too many people today have neither, and schools could do worse than trying to develop those two qualities in students.
