The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez

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As a student, most would agree that every year brings its own set of challenges. But with each difficult situation, both inside and outside the classroom, many students can take comfort in the fact that they are not alone. Universally, all students experience, to some level, a degree of commonality within their educational journeys. From strenuous exams to conflicts with family, it is this shared experience that binds us all together. In Richard Rodriguez’s essay “The Achievement of Desire”, he relates his own story of education and being a student to Richard Hoggart’s “scholarship boy”. By taking on the role of the learner, and subsequently placing himself within the narrative of education, Rodriguez has had to reflect upon his experience …show more content…
The stereotypical good student, the scholarship student, is academically successful, motivated by the praise and attention he or she receives from their teacher. While this student is the archetype of perfection for a teacher, he or she suffers, what Rodriguez coins as a “consequent price- the loss,” for their academic achievement (535). No longer can the scholarship student mingle his home and school life, instead each category falls into its own private sphere, with academics taking the forefront in the student’s life. For the student, school is home to an air of intellectualism that home lacks, and in order to fully submerse oneself into this environment the other must be cast off (536). For Rodriguez, he found himself in this category of “scholarship boy” easily. He struggled to gain help from his working class, uneducated parents on homework, and he felt isolated from his family because they could not comprehend, to the level he wanted them to, his love of reading. As time continued, he found himself drawn more towards his teachers. To Rodriguez, his teachers were his idols, and everything he did was in a way to emulate them. At one point in his essay he laments about the discussion between his father and teacher stating, “. . . felt ashamed of his labored, accented words. . . my teacher was so soft spoken and her words were edged sharp and clean” (538). The lack of his parents education makes Rodriguez feel as though he does not have a proper place in the school, his teachers know everything that his parents do not know. The uncertainty of the scholarship boy is what is most dangerous to this student because, like Alan Lovell states, “Mr. Hoggart’s scholarship boy is an outsider” (33). Lovell recounts his experience of, as he states, being thrust into this “new world of culture”, an uncharted territory where for him

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