Gaining or suffering from education??

The school year is over. The play has come to an end. Rita has faced several challenges in her life, but none as challenging as getting an education.

At the beginning of the play, Rita said she wanted to know everything the educated ones knew. She hold the belief that the high and educated classes were people who felt superior because they could maintain conversations about various topics. And she wanted to be like them, being able to have a normal conversation with any kind of person, and expressing her ideas in the appropriate way.

Throughout the play, we noticed changes in Rita's way of speaking, trying to sound more proficient and cultivated. She also suffers changes in her personal life, she separates from her husband, quits her job at the hairdresser's, and starts getting in touch with normal students and people with whom she probably would never have had a relationship if she hadn't started attending college.

By the end of the play, Rita's apparently learnt to judge her relationships better, after realising people are not always as they seem. She seems to be able to apply her knewly acquired knowledge in her life. She has a new job, she is considering new possible ways to go on with her life...

I believe that Rita has both suffered and gained something from her experience in university.

She has suffered personal losses: her husband Denny, her family and friends have grown appart from her. She suffered greatly the culture clash she experienced both with Frank and the rest of the students. Her coming from a working-class environment certainly had some drawbacks through the learning process. She had problems at the beginning dealing with new authors and vocabulary, as she couldn't quite grasp the true meaning of the bibliography. She tried to make herself understood by means of her own jargon, which was not possible nor acceptable if she really wanted to learn as the rest of the students and pass exams in the right way.

She had to "adapt" her way of speaking her mind, she learnt how to be objective rather than subjective, which was EXTREMELY difficult for her, as she is very straightforward.
She gained streetwise knowledge, appart from academic knowledge. She learnt to be objective but without loosing her originality and uniqueness.

Rita has changed a lot during the course of the play, but without completely loosing herself. She knows she comes from a different background than most of the average students, but she is OK with this fact. She has come to terms with her personal life and she has accepted the good and the bad things that came to her as a result from getting an education.

What's most important is that she knows SHE HAS A CHOICE. She is free to choose how to live her life, who to relate with, what to do with herself. And she knows she is the one responsible for the outcomes of her decisions.

Educating Rita or Educating Frank??

Coming to the end of the play, I think Rita has learned quite a lot. She's not only learned how to express her ideas somewhat better, she has also learned to be a better person, to judge others better. Frank has also learned that there's more in life that only what he wants from it.

I think the play ends with Rita cutting Frank's hair as a way to show us that both of them have grown as individuals. They are now able to share better and they can learn from each other as people, as friends, not only as teacher and student. Rita tells Frank he is a very good teacher, as he has helped her pass the exam by giving her all the tools she needed academically speaking. But she also thanks him because he also gave her tools to understand the world better. Having Rita cut Frank's hair shows that she can also teach him something about life, something related to be a better person

No matter the colour, the chamaleon is still the same...

Rita has apparently changed. She has changed her job, her friends, her entire environment... She has even changed her name AGAIN.

By the end of scene 5, she lets Frank know she has changed her name because "Rita" was only "pretencious crap" and she got to realise that. What, in my opinion and in Frank's too, she doesn't seem to see is that her self is not only in her name. Frank calls after her different names to try to know her new name, though she doesn't answer.

What he wants to make her see, is that even if she changes her name over and over again, she will still be the original "Rita", or actually Susan... He is a bit worried she has ended up loosing the real person who was eager to learn, to become more educated so as to be better.

I think that along the process of learning, which Rita also saw as a way of self-discovery, somehow she found herself with new interests and lost track of her real goal: LEARN. She has learned a lot about life, though, perhaps in a way that Franks envies.

Dear Diary

Beginning of school year,
Mr. Burgess has just informed me he won't follow the instructions I gave him when he took charge of the class. It's outrageous! How dare he contradict my orders?! I shall follow this class very closely, there is no chance this class will come to overcome all its problems...

First term is over,
Though Mr. Burgess's behaviour has been reported to the Board of Education, he has continued to disobey my line-ups... In spite of this, I have notices some unbelievable progress in the students' performance... I may have misjudged them... and Burgess... perhaps he really knew what he had to do...

Test results have arrived,
I have just seen the final tests' results from Mr. Burgess. It's uncanny, incredible...! I'm really out of words... I cannot believe how he did it, but he managed to make this children do their best!... Only a couple of them got Cs , while the rest got As and Bs... Really amazing....

Talking properly

Rita's been a new woman for some time now. She is separated from Denny, she shares a flat with another girl, she speaks her mind with other students, teachers and tutors.

Following this new trend, Rita follows her flat mate's advice and decides she needs to "speak properly" to go with this new "her". She claims she's been herself by using this peculiar voice and avoiding her normal jargon. She pronunces every single syllable and doesn't cut up words. According to her, speaking this way she is being her true self. She means that she doesn't want to use her normal, ugly voice now that she is a different person.

I think she doesn't need to disguise her voice to show she has changed. Being able to speak her mind making sense of what she says, something she was always able to do, is more than enough to show she is different. She is a new person, altough she remains being herself.

Ch... ch.. CHANGES!! Face the strange...

Rita's last words in this scene refer to William Blake's work "Songs of Innocence and Experience". Rita is back from summer school and shows a drastic change from the Rita in the last scene. She is restless, more positive; she is free of inhibitions and wants to transmit Frank her new attitude, renewed after being in London.

By mentioning innocence and experience, the author is refering to Rita and Frank. Rita is the young, naif and inocent girl who had wished to change her life, and apparently has done so. Frank is the mature, experienced man who was to help her change. Now Rita has changed too much in Frank's view. He thinks she has achieved her goal of changing her life, and he is afraid he'll loose her as she doen't need him anymore to learn how to be a better person.

Doing better

When Rita's mother says "we could sing better songs than those", Rita realises she is not the only one in her family who wishes could change herself. She understands her mother also longs or had once longed for the opportunity to change herself and her lifestyle.

This shows that even people who seem happy about their lives sometimes wish they were better or different somehow. By defying her reality and wanting something more, Rita shows everyone what many people would like to do: being herself and doing whatever is necessary to become someone better, in her case, through getting an education.