The Pudlian Pygmalion: Educating Workers in the Age of the Open University

This paper focuses on the comedy drama Educating Rita (1980) to explore the theme of the broadening of educational access for the working class and non traditional University students in the 1960s. Heavily drawing on Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion (1914), though adding elements associated with the campus novel, Educating Rita resets Shaw’s play in the tail end of a period of social mobility for working class people through educational advancement. The paper looks at what Educating Rita gets right and wrong about the Open University and its broader aims of transforming education and redefining the role of self-development within the University context. It examines what the drama illuminates about class and educational access, the changing concepts of the University in a contemporary democratic setting and the problems besetting such transformations.