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5. Do you think Rita has gained or suffered as a result of her education?

I think that Rita both has suffered and gained as a result of her education.
Having married a selfish and jealous man, she felt sophocated, living an ordinary life. But she had a gut feeling that life was not just like that; that there was something to know to understand it and she was determined to find it. She decided to be educated.
Education is a process and like any other process it's painful; you must adapt yourself to new changes and what is new scares you. It's like being in a dark tunnel where you can't see well, and so you look for an exit to see a light. When you first see the light, it hurts your eyes and you may freak out and go back, but if you get closer you become accustomed to it and then you can see properly; you can see reality better.
At the beginning of the play she was scared and disappointed and felt that she couldn't keep up with "the proper students", but then, after studying hard and experiencing a new way of living at London summer school, she was able to make questions in daily lectures among a lot of people.
All in all, through education Rita gained confidence in herself, experience, freedom, knowledge and critical thinking. In the end, she became a person ready to make better choices in life and also able to be open to others. So she felt happy with herself for having succeeded in her goal.

"A new dress"

At the beginning of the story Rita said that to compensate herself in a way for her boring life, she would buy her a new dress in order to feel happy and not to worry about it, instead of making an effort by being educated to understand life and try to solve hers.
But then, she decided that she would not buy a new dress unless she became educated.
At this particular moment in the play, Frank thinks that Rita is already an educated woman who is able to make her own decisions and take charge of her own life.

Out of recognition

Rita wants to change her name because according to her, it represents the person she once was. Now, she has grown up and has been educated. She is not as innocent and ignorant as she was before starting the course. She knows what clothes to wear, what wine to buy, what plays to see, what books and papers to read. She is so independent that she feels able to do without Frank's trying to teach her more. So she prefers another name according to her present state.

Confidence

At the beginning of the course, she thought that she was at a different level of understanding from the students on the lawn; she felt inferior to them.
Now, that she has become more confident about her knowledge of literature, she is able to discuss about it with the students. Furthermore, one of those students seems to be an idiot since he gave a wrong appreciation of a play, according to her. Now, that she can interprete literature better, she realizes when others do well or not.

"Experience kills innocence"

In his poems, William Blake describes Innocence and Experience as two contrary states of the Human soul, both important and inseparable.
I think that to interprete those poems and Blake's warning us that it's not possible or desirable to choose between both states of Innocence and Experience, it was necessary for Rita to have been in such states at a particular time and that was what has happened to her.
Whether we like it or not, we grow old and as a consequence we leave innocence behind because we come to know through new experiences of life, for the better or the worse.
Rita is no longer innocent; she had new experiences, some bad like her splitting up from her husband and some others good like her achievements at summer school which let her grow up.

Chickening out?

Rita didn't go to Frank's dinner party because she felt that she did not know how to behave well in a party where she would meet people with a higher level of knowledge than hers.
Neither did she know what to say nor remembered anything about what she had learnt. Moreover, she did not know what dress to wear and what sort of wine to buy.
Anyway, after a long journey because of taking the wrong bus, she could get there. However, she did not dare to come in. She seemed to be very disappointed.

The importance of learning a language

Rita used these words to express her enthusiasm for Macbeth:
"I thought it was gonna be dead borin'...
But listen, it wasn't borin' , it was bleedin' great honest, ogh, it done me in, it was fantastic. I'm gonna do an essay on it".
Of course, her language is not acceptable to do an essay. In the past, in England class was determined by the way people spoke but even more important was their accent. For example, people with strong accent like Rita's were assumed to be working class while people with RP accent was assumed to be upper or upper-middle class. However, then it was acceptable to speak standard British English in public speaking, radio, TV, books, newspapers, at school and university. That is why she is supposed to learn standard English. She must learn British language and how to use it in certain circumstances, that is in context.