Studying is hard and boring. Teaching is hard and boring. So, what you're telling me is to be bored, and then bored, and 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 color, or fun! It's probably just as well 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... Jew, and 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 anymore Ms. Walters. You've got to tell us why you're doing it.
The die is cast once our protagonist reproaches her headmistress with these words. Jazz, sex, and fashion has lured the straight A student right into a critique of everyday life in 1960s London. Her parents' dreams of their daughter at Oxford dashed by the cigarettes and nightlife offered by David, a much older man, offering young Jenny the real meaning of carpe diem. But now Jenny has found out that the man that has proposed to her is already married and has a family. She runs back to school, and, in the last moment, just as her future looks squandered, is accepted into Oxford after all.
University is here, it seems, to simply save youth from its own naivete and teddy boys and the poisonous glamor of the underprivileged. A film about school that need not justify the reason for getting an education, it need only offer college as a space and experience safe from the alternative of untrustworthy, uneducated people. The critique quoted above remains unanswered, but apparently that critique is just a lot less important than taking one's turn at getting ahead. In other words, "boring" by some unexplained twist of logic remains the true road to social mobility, personal freedom, and the opportunity for individuals to become who they really are.
