Richard Rodriguez The Achievement Of Desire Analysis

In his essay, “The Achievement of Desire”, Richard Rodriguez shares an emotional narrative to convince his readers of the great changes students go through during the academic process. He injects his pathos and simple language into this essay for the purpose of appealing to a substantial audience. He used the writings of Richard Hoggart in Hoggart’s book, The Uses of Literacy, to back up his strong opinions on what a scholarship boy is and how the working class endures more struggles while they strive for academic success. He quotes from Hoggart’s book often in his essay in order to persuade the reader that nostalgia towards his family life, prior to schooling, is common among students from the working class. Rodriguez uses “The Achievement …show more content…
He thought that books were crucial for academic success which is why he became so obsessed with them. He wrote that these books he read made him a confident writer and speaker. He also stated that he was “bookish”; instead of having a point of view from the books he read, he sought out a point of view from the text (Rodriguez 350). All the ideas that Rodriguez had were borrowed from books, he lacked self confidence because he was unable to think critically about what he read. His need to fit in and succeed outweighed his ability to form opinions other than that of the teachers. This type of education can be closely related to the “banking” method of education made famous by Paulo Freire in his essay “The Banking Concept of Education”. There is a section of Freire’s essay which explains how teachers have their students leave their culture at the classroom door and adapt their new ideas as their own realities.
“Those who use the banking approach, knowingly or unknowingly...fail to perceive that the deposits themselves contain contradictions about reality. But, sooner or later, these contradictions may lead formerly passive students to turn against their domestication and the attempt to domesticate reality (Freire …show more content…
He was surrounded by people he saw on a regular basis who never smiled or said hello. It was this epiphany of loneliness that lead Rodriguez home. In that room in the British Museum, he scoured for knowledge from what he referred to as “educational experts” (354). He wrote, “I needed to learn how far I had moved from my past- to determine how fast I would be able to recover something of it once again. But I found little. Only a chapter in a book by Richard Hoggart…” (Rodriguez 354). Ironically, he found the answers he was looking for in books; more specifically a book that contained a chapter that clearly describe him and his education in the “scholarship boy”. The education he worked so hard for both negatively and positively impacted him; “His need to think so much and so abstractly about his parents and their relationships was in itself an indication of his long education” and “The ability to consider experience so abstractly allowed him to shape into desire what would otherwise have remained indefinite, meaningless longing in the British Museum” (355). To Rodriguez, the isolation and loneliness he felt during his long academic journey was a necessary step to reach the “end of education” (Rodriguez