Quote 31
I stayed in school. I was not the smartest or even particularly outstanding but I was there and staying out of trouble and I intended to finish. This is not to say that I was unfamiliar with the back seat of a Chevrolet. I knew the scenery of Greenup Road, which we called Steam-It-Up Road, and I knew what a pecker looked like, and none of these sights had so far inspired me to get hogtied to a future as a tobacco farmer's wife. Mama always said barefoot and pregnant was not my style. She knew. (1.9)
As Marietta Greer grows up in Pittman County, Kentucky, she thinks of her high school diploma as the thing that will help her to break away from her rural hometown. For her, education is a ticket to a better (or at least a different) kind of life. Better than a diploma in barefoot and pregnant, at least.
Quote 32
I thought I knew about every ugly thing that one person does to another, but I had never even thought about such things being done to a baby girl. (1.149)
Taylor gets more than one kind of education in The Bean Trees. Although her high school education and her encounters with violence while working in the hospital gave her basic knowledge, her understanding of the world gets deeper as she witnesses some of the hardships that others are forced to endure.
Quote 33
Mattie's, of course, was a tire store and sanctuary.
Slowly I was coming to understand exactly what this meant. For one thing, people came and went quietly. And stayed quietly. Around to the side of Mattie's place, above the mural Lou Ann and I called Jesus Around the World, there was an upstairs window that looked out over the park. I saw faces there, sometimes Esperanza's and sometimes others, staring across the empty space. (8.102-103)
When Taylor first arrives in Tucson, Arizona, she has next to no sense of global politics or America's place on the world stage. Through her association with Mattie, she slowly learns about the kinds of conflict that create political refugees. We're not in Kentucky anymore, Toto.