“Scholarship boy: good student, troubled son” (Rodriguez 341). A scholarship boy is one that strays away from the people that care most about them in order to succeed academically. Freire would appreciate that Rodriguez is beginning to understand that the regurgitation of information does not lead to a better student, but in fact makes them a worse student because all they do is reiterate what they are told and do not fully learn and develop an understanding for the topic. In Freire’s essay he says: The more students work at storing the deposits entrusted to them, the less they develop the critical consciousness which would result from their intervention in the world as transformers of that world. The more completely they accept the passive role imposed on them, the more they tend simply to adapt to the world as it is and to the fragmented view of reality deposited in them. (Freire …show more content…
By copying Rodriguez’s teachers and professors to make himself more insightful, he is losing an opportunity to gain a great amount of knowledge because he is not retaining the information instead he is storing it for when it is requested. As Rodriguez sits down to write his dissertation he has an epiphany about who he is and who he wants to be. He realizes that all of his life he has put his education first, so much that he has now completely isolated himself and has no one. He accepts that for the vast majority of his schooling he was in fact a scholarship boy, he had no creativity or originality and never questioned information given to him. Due to this he has no true understanding of any subject rather he just memorizes the material for the sake of memorizing it without actually absorbing the information. He acquired new knowledge through literature, he was able to read thousands of books and memorize information from each of them. But because he never took the time to fully understand the material being presented to him, “He becomes in every obvious way the worst student, a dummy mouthing the opinions of others” (Rodriguez 352). Instead of Rodriguez knowing a small amount of information and being an expert of the subject, he knows an extensive amount of information but does not actually understand any of it. Freire would