Language is at the center of both cultural division and cultural interaction. George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart provide two perspectives of how twentieth century British literature approached the issue of interacting cultures. On one hand, Shaw's Pygmalion, a work full of linguistic representation, provides a hopeful outlook of cultural interaction, where education is a savior, giving an individual power to move from one cultural society into another. On the other hand, Achebe's Things Fall Apart demonstrates the possible negative outcomes of cultural interaction, where education is a tyrant used by an invading culture to subdue the invaded. Through a sociolinguistic approach to reading these works, readers can gain insight into the possible implications of modern cultural interaction, which specifically reveals how education provides an individual with power and how educators have a responsibility to those being educated.