Nick Hornby’s Oscar-nominated film, An Education, seems at first to have a misleading name. After all, the central character struggles with Latin, is discouraged from French and gives up a very privileged education for an older man, who turns out to be married. Thankfully, in both film and in real life, the protagonist – the impressive journalist and theatre critic Lynn Barber – learns her lesson. Barber gets into Oxford and then the rest, as they say, is history.
When we first tried to get children to watch An Education at FILMCLUB (an after-school club that shows quality films to over 200 000 children a week), it was greeted with great scepticism. Who wants to watch a film with that title, when this is one precious time in the school day that might actually avoid education? But now the story of Barber turning her back on education is helping hundreds of thousands of children to rediscover the importance of their own.
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