My first day at school My first day at school was a new adventure for me. I had to wear a school uniform: a blue dress and handmade leather sandals. Having run around all but naked for the first eight years of my life, it was very exciting. At school we learnt about Australian culture and its social classes as well as social classes worldwide. Throughout my studies I learnt that Australia wasn't a classless society. The class to which a person belonged determined how they were treated and we learnt through two particular films:' Educating Rita' (Willy Russell, 1983) and 'My Fair Lady' (Bernard Shaw, 1964) that it is indeed possible to break the mould and change where you end up in life. Rita is a twenty-six year old hairdresser from Liverpool who wants an education. Not the sort of education that would get her a better job or higher wages, but an education that would give her more choices and freedom. Rita wants to be a different person and lead a different sort of lifestyle she has led previously. ?Educating Rita? describes the tests and alterations that the young hairdresser has to go through to develop from a person with very little education to someone who passes her exams with distinctions. Frank Bryant teaches comparative literature and it is his job to teach Rita. Frank has lost all enthusiasm for his job. He loathes most of his students, and the main purpose of the rows of classical literature in the bookshelves in his office is to hide the whiskey bottles. Rita is seen as a lower class citizen. She has very little education and describes a religious painting as ?pornography of its days?, she drops the end consonants of her words and swears often. As she?s walking down towards her house it?s raining and looks ve... ... middle of paper ... ...hange in confidence. Just like Rita, she has developed a sense of worth and no longer endures all of the insults like she use to and this is easily seen when she exclaims , ?I won?t be passed over?I want a little kindness?.am not the dirt under you feet?I stand alone without you? In both of the films we are swayed to side with Rita and Eliza because they are battling against impossible odds by trying to attain education. We are led to disprove of Frank?s and Henry?s attitudes towards their students and social class because they have everything that most people dream of, yet they don?t seem as thankful. Both of these films are displaying a uniform message to its audience. Education, in another word, is emancipation. It is the liberation of a person from a member of a stereotypical society to an active agent who can choose and change where he or she ends up in life.
However, what Toni Cade Bambara actually wanted to tell the readers was the importance of an education and the value of thinking, by showing the contrast of educational background between Miss Moore and Sylvia, and the process that Sylvia gets into the knowledge of the world.
Class is a key idea related to inequality, prejudice and discrimination in Australian society. It has been considered out of fashion, because some Australian people think that there is no class difference between people in Australia, everyone enjoys equality in society. In fact, the recent de-regulation of the workplace, and the widening gap in access to hospitals, schools and employment opportunities between the rich and poor, have made class more visible in Australian than ever before. Class is "a category of people who have generally similar educational histories, job opportunities, and social standing and who are conscious of their membership in a social group that is ranked in relation to others and is replicated over generations" (Kent, 1998:87). This essay argues that class cause continues to inequality in Australian society. Firstly, class structures labor market inequality. Secondly, class shapes the quality of a person's life. Thirdly, class inequality produces continuing class differences into the next generation. Finally, class has becoming a debate in Australian society, because class inequality encourages the `right' people to work more efficiently in the workforce and helps people to identify themselves in society, but continuing relevance of the concept of class is a matter in contemporary Australia.
Rita was able to create an image of the ideal man she would have liked Marcus to become, and convinced herself that was the man she was going to settle with. Marcus was initially drawn to Rita, not for her “frizzy, uncombable black hair, or burdensome breasts, but the face that he insisted no guy on campus could forget, and the legs he insisted were not birdlike” (73). Due to Marcus’ personality traits he did not seem to notice that he was sabotaging any possibility of ever having anything serious with
Being raised up in a dreadful environment with abusive parents will surely cause your life to deviate from ones that were raised in a loving home. Maggie, whom’s life were portrayed with a sense of individuality were purposed to manufacture a sense of uniqueness, and yet her outlook on people and life are anything but unprecedented. The story that started with full potential were written away as she head towards a gloomy future full of persecution and abandonment. Maggie is no different than most people from centuries before and after her time due to her failure in separating personal desires from professional ones which is illustrated in her consciousness in appearances, her will of dependency, and her opportunistic outlook.
In Act One, Scene One when Rita is first introduced, she’s a hairdresser and part of the working class. Russell introduced Rita as an audacious, ambitious but egoistic character. She isn’t scared to express her opinion, which generally amuses the audience, such as when she describes her opinion on the painting in Frank’s office she interprets it differently to what majority of the population would. The reason for her different interpretation is that she’s not educated to the degree that she would be familiar with that style of painting, this also becomes obvious when Frank and Rita discuss challenging death and disease: Rita refers to a poem that people in her class are more likely to read (later she describes this kind of poetry as ‘the sort of poetry you can understand’ and assumes that Frank won‘t like it as it’s simple and doesn’t have any hidden meanings) when Frank thought she was referring to a more sophisticated poem by Dylan Thomas. Throughout the scene we learn that Rita wants to understand ‘everything’ so she can enjoy things like ballet or opera, and that’s the reason why she enrolled on the course in the first place. She explains that she didn’t believe the University would accept her and the audience can see that she’s scared of what it might mean.
According to the College Health website, “No one is immune from stress, but those entering the ivory towers of college are particularly vulnerable to it.” Attending college for the first time gave me a feeling of displacement, nonetheless, I maintained my sense of priority, I am here to learn, here to excel, and here to focus on my objective.
Ultimately, Educating Rita is a comic play which examines some serious themes such as social class and the transforming effect of education on working class people, who choose to take it up. The monotony of only ever seeing one set and two actors is more than made up for by the quality of Russell's comic imagination and the importance of his themes in today's society.
In order to become educated, the have to make sacrifices: Eliza has to give up her accent and Rita loses her spontaneity and originality. They also become alienated from their working class backgrounds, for they advance socially through acquiring education. Unlike Rita, Eliza didn't want to change her character. Rita, on the other hand, had dreamed of becoming a completely different person. Consequently, when Rita is happy after passing her exam, whereas Eliza is feels lost between two worlds, neither belonging to the working class nor the middle class.
way she speaks to him but in fact we see that Rita is a new student of
Rita started out as an uneducated woman in the beginning. In the end after all she learned she changed her ways by knowing more about literature, not following her parent’s beliefs, and by changing her appearance. Rita felt some discomfort with the other students. The way the other students talked as educated people motivated her to take her learning seriously. People think that some should just stay as they are, but others say that change is up to the person wanting a better life. I agree, people should be in control of their own life and not have people guide them through it. In an article by Dan Montano, he says that, “People now go through cultural dissonance, most are faced with situations where the person perceives conflicts from rules of one another.” This means that many are still facing cultural dissonance with rules of cultures that are different to
Rita wants to improve herself and her life style. She wants to be in a
Rita is a working class woman in her late twenties trying to find herself through a university education; Frank is a divorced university professor in his early fifties. Bored of teaching Frank drinks his life away and has taken on Rita as an Open University student to fund this habit. These two interesting characters from very different backgrounds are thrown together and the clashes of class and culture are depicted in a number of ways. Rita's language is very colloquial and this, at times, amuses Frank; for example, 'What in the name of God is being off one's cake.' Her language is both new and puzzling to Frank as he is used to hearing the generally proper English spoken by his university students.
Where teachers teaching methods were kind of silly, making us copy whatever they wrote on the chalkboard and rewrite it over and over. Our homework was pretty much the same deal, after all it was only elementary school. Lunch at our school was an adventure, there was a river behind our school so we would go out there and look for fruit trees. We would eat mangos or whatever fruit we could find and some boys will even go swimming. So arriving to a place that had everything that I needed at my fingertips and lunch served in an air conditioned room; not understanding anyone or anything made it a very terrifying experience in many
The narrator begins her search going over the different educational experiences available to men and women and the more material ...
“People knew I was different. But not less.” Temple Grandin understood what she had, but she knew she was not less than anyone else. She did what anyone else could do. She knew she could push through everyday, no matter how hard and how long it took. Temple is not different, but she is unique! “We’re focusing so much on academics that we’ve taken out things like, art, sewing, cooking, woodworking, music, and other things that introduce kids to careers.” Temple Grandin is trying to explain and tell the world that it is not all about academics. She had the tremendously strong willpower to prove that what she was thinking was actually right. She wanted people to stop worrying about all academics and more about the arts, sports, and the creativity of all of it. Because if not, only the few students that excel at academics are