What does Rita gain from her education and what does she lose?

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Jack Warder

Educating Rita by Willy Russell

What does Rita gain from her education and what does she lose?

When the heroine of ‘Educating Rita’ begins her personal crusade to gain an education by pursuing an open university course in English Literature, although she realises it will be hard work, she does not have any idea what she will lose as well as gain when she achieves her goal.

There are only two characters in the play, Rita, the student and Frank, her tutor although many other people are important to the play and are referred to frequently. All the action takes place in Frank’s study, on the first floor of a typical university building in the north of England.

Frank is a lecturer in English Literature, and needs the occasional bottle of whisky to help him cope with his students. He has never taken an Open University student before, and has taken Rita on, against his better judgement, to help pay for his drink.

Rita is a totally, uneducated, working class hairdresser, with a Liverpool accent, who is both forthright and funny, although she has a great capacity for self-criticism, and a strong desire to acquire knowledge. She simply  wants to know ‘everything.’

Although Frank has become quite smitten by Rita’s fresh approach and original views, his reluctance to teach Rita is made worse by his cynicism and the fact he considers he is “actually an appalling tutor.”

Rita, however, insists that he is the only tutor she wants. She can relate to him, he looks like a “geriatric hippy” and is “a crazy mad piss artist who wants to throw his students through the window”

Rita would probably not have felt so at ease with a conventional tutor.

Rita has pre-formed ideas about what “real” students are like: this shows her innocent, yet street-wise naivety about higher education although she has the ability to choose between the background and upbringing she had, and the educated world. One day she questions herself

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        “Is this the absolute maximum I can expect from this livin’ lark?”

Rita’s knowledge of reading is limited to trashy novels like “Ruby Fruit jungle”, by Harold Robbins and when confronted with “Howard’s End” by E.M. Forster she considers it “crap”

Rita has to learn the difference between ‘appreciation and criticism’

She gradually begins to gain from her education. Rita has now read three novels: two of the literary kind, and one of the cheap fiction variety she is used to, where the main emphasis is on sex. Frank points out that not all books are literature, although she ...

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