screenplay, first edition 2009, English
“The HEADMISTRESS moves closer.
Nobody does anything worth doing without a degree.
JENNY
Nobody does anything worth doing with a degree. No woman, anyway.
HEADMISTRESS
So what I do isn´t worth doing? Or what Miss Stubbs does, or Mrs Wilson, or any of us here?
JENNY doesn´t say anything. The HEADMISTRESS takes her silence as an admission of defeat.
Because none of us would be here without our degrees, you realise that, don´t you? And yes, of course studying is hard, and boring, and…
JENNY can´t contain herself any longer.
JENNY
Boring!
HEADMISTRESS
I´m sorry?
JENNY
Studying is hard and boring. Teaching is hard and boring. So what you´re telling me is to be bored, and then bored, and then finally bored again, but this time for the rest of my life. This whole stupid country is bored. There´s no life in it, or colour, or fun. It´s probably just as well that the Russians are going to drop a nuclear bomb on us any day now. So my choice is to do something hard and boring, or to marry my… my Jew and to go to Paris and Rome and listen to jazz and read and eat good food in nice restaurants and have fun. It´s not enough to educate us any more, Miss Walters. You´ve got to tell us why you´re doing it.
She has never had to answers this question before.
HEADMISTRESS
It doesn´t have to be teaching, you know. There´s the Civil Service.
JENNY
I don´t wish to be impertinent, Miss Walters. But it is an argument worth rehearsing. You never know. Someone else might want to know the point of it all, one day.
JENNY leaves the office.”
(Nick Hornby, An Education, p 162 – 163)
(Here´s the trailer of the movie.)
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