This jewel of a film ought to be seen by all who teach, learn, or wish they were doing either.
Julie Walters turns in the Oscar-nominated performance of a lifetime as an Open University working-class student turning up at Michael Caine’s (also Oscar nominated) Oxford rooms for tutoring in literature.
The results are hilarious but – more important – deeply revealing of the pretensions on both sides of the class gap that separates these two stars of this low-budget 1983 production.
Walters, whose ‘Rita’ imagines herself ‘a little out of step’ with the University thing, is gorgeous and versatile. Caine plays a latter-day drunk Socrates, who only knows one thing: ‘I know that I know absolutely nothing’.
He’s wrong of course. He knows more than that and he discovers some of it via’s delightful invasion of his miserable life. But, like Socrates, he is wrong in the very best way and his methodological insight unclutters the poverty that allows him to become rich.
Educating Rita is one hundred eleven minutes of pure joy, a largely unremembered romantic comedy and more that may belong on your list of top ten movies.
Watch it with your son or daughter who’s heading off to university, lest he or she think too much of her teachers and too little of life.
Canter Bridge 
Life Imitates Art.
I still remember seeing this movie for the first time and being inspired to believe that, even though coming from a non-academic family, perhaps even I could oneday break out of a safe career in nursing and do what I had dreamed of doing – go to uni and study the Humanities. And I did.
And you did!
Well done, Sue.