Education In Richard Rodriguez's The Hunger Of Memory

Lastly, people should value formal education over informal education because formal education reflects a standardized system in which society works. In the chapter “Credo,” from the novel, Hunger of Memory, Rodriguez exemplifies how formal education teaches the standard system of society through his Catholic school’s philosophy of teaching. He recalls how in his youth, the Catholic religion connected his public and private life despite the growing division of education and family because he could not differentiate between his home and church Catholicism. Rodriguez attended a Catholic school that emphasized the practice of memorization to learn about God and the Bible. Reflecting on their method of teaching, he realizes that “For contrary to more progressive notions of learning, much that is learned in a classroom must be the already known; and much that is already known must be learned before a student can achieve truly independent thought” (Richard 94). In opposing the modern concept of learning, Rodriguez discovers a universal truth about formal education in which “much that is learned in a classroom must be the already known” because a student must understand and process the knowledge already discovered before they can “achieve truly independent thought.” Rodriguez uses an anadiplosis to explain that the concepts and information in school, the “already known,” must be learned by students in school in order for the capability of discovering different things on their own

Rodriguez's autobiography also portrays the social and economic problems with affirmative action for the "privileged" minority student. He reports, "In the late 1960s nonwhite Americans clamored for access to higher education, and I became a principal beneficiary of the academy's response, its programs of affirmative action" (143). Ironically, the author now regrets having been involved with (or forced into) accepting the "assistance" these programs offered: "For me there is no way to say it with grace. I say it rather with irony sharpened with self-pity. I say it with anger. It is a term that should never have been foisted on me. One I was wrong to accept" (143). Potential students from the lowest socioeconomic groups were not even considered by institutions of higher learning simply because the colleges only looked at the boxes checked on applications, and not the actual student's financial needs. The author explains, "Most blacks simply couldn't afford tuition for higher education. And, because the primary and secondary schooling blacks received was usually poor, few qualified for admission. Many were so culturally alienated that they never thought to apply; they couldn't even imagine themselves going to

Purpose: Alexie highlights how he ultimately overcame the hardships suffered during his early years due to his Indian ethnicity and displays how Native Americans were, and continue, to suffer from discrimination.

Sherman Alexie, in “Indian Education” tells his experiences in school on the reservation. Some of his teachers did not treat him very good and did not try to understand him. In his ninth grade year he collapsed. A teacher assumed that he had been drinking just because he was Native American. The teacher said, “What’s that boy been drinking? I know all about these Indian kids. They start drinking real young.” Sherman Alexie didn’t listen to the negatives in school. He persevered and became valedictorian of his school.

Adjusting to another culture is a difficult concept, especially for children in their school classrooms. In Sherman Alexie’s, “Indian Education,” he discusses the different stages of a Native Americans childhood compared to his white counterparts. He is describing the schooling of a child, Victor, in an American Indian reservation, grade by grade. He uses a few different examples of satire and irony, in which could be viewed in completely different ways, expressing different feelings to the reader. Racism and bullying are both present throughout this essay between Indians and Americans. The Indian Americans have the stereotype of being unsuccessful and always being those that are left behind. Through Alexie’s negativity and humor in his

Sherman Alexie recalls his childhood memory of learning to read, and his teaching experience in “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me”. He devotes his interest to reading. By this way, he breaks the stereotype that Indian boys are expected to be stupid and dumb, and later on he becomes a successful writer because of his endeavor to read. Alexie vividly narrates his younger life by using metaphor and repetition with a confident tone, in order to strengthen his description of his reading talent, his influence to the other Indian boys and how he struggles in poverty to change his life.

Education —an institution for success, opportunity, and progress — is itself steeped in racism. In Sherman Alexie’s short story “Indian Education” from his book The Longer Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is set in two places, the Spokane Indian Reservation and a farm town nearby the reservation. The story is written in a list of formative events chronologize Victor’s youth by depicting the most potent moment from each year he is in school. Alexie addresses the issue of racism in education by examining examples of injustice and discrimination over twelve years in a boy’s life. Victor faces his initial injustice in first grade when he is bullied by bigger kids, but his understanding of injustice becomes much more complex in grades two through twelve as he experiences discrimination against his American Indian identity. Familial experiences of a Native woman, Alexie’s style and humor, and Victor’s awareness of discrimination from grade one to twelve all reveal the grim reality of growing up and being schooled on an American Indian reservation.

Growing up as a Native American boy on a reservation, Sherman Alexie was not expected to succeed outside of his reservation home. The expectations for Native American children were not very high, but Alexie burst out of the stereotype and expectations put by white men. Young Native Americans were not expected to overcome their stereotypes and were forced to succumb to low levels of reading and writing “he was expected to fail in a non-Indian world” (Alexie 3), but Alexie was born with a passion for reading and writing, so much so that he taught himself to read at age three by simply looking at images in Marvel comics and piecing the words and pictures together. No young Native American had made it out of his reservation to become a successful writer like he did. This fabricates a clear ethos for Alexie, he is a perfect underdog in an imperfect world.

Alexie’s narrator describes a story of assumption and discrimination through not only the thoughts of the narrator and his life, but also how the narrator explains his thoughts and the diction he uses as he recalls certain moments. Throughout the passage, the narrator demonstrates how isolated he is, not only in the country where hia people are shunned, but also with others that are in a situation similar to his. Not only is there a feeling of loneliness and isolation, but also guilt of relation to how Indians are being treated today. Through stories of realistic fiction, Alexie addresses serious issues that others fail to.

As he grew up to become a writer, we see pain in the story he tells. “I loved those books, but I also knew that love had only one purpose. I was trying to save my life” (pg.18). Alexie wanted to be someone greater than what others expected him to be. People would put him down constantly, but he fought back just as much. He tried to save himself from the stereotypes of being just another dumb Indian. He had more determination to prove others wrong when it came too exceeding in reading to further excel in his daily life.

They would make him stay quiet in class because most of them did not like to speak during class with their non-Indian teacher. Even though at home they would talk nonstop about anything. These kids did not grow up to have opportunities they could have had because they were not given a proper education. The non-Indian teachers did not push the kids to learn and they did not care about their student's education. The kids knew that they were expected to fail with their education, and they grew up knowing it was okay to fail because they were Indian. However, Alexie did not accept that. He knew he could pass and that he was smart, so he challenged himself to learn out of the classroom. Reading became the center of his education; he read late into the night, at recess, during lunch, after class, and whenever he could make time to. As a boy he read everything he could find with words on it including all the books his dad had at home, newspapers, library books, cereal boxes, posters, manuals. Even though he loved books he knew reading saved his education and his entire life. His future was opened up to new opportunities because he was educated.

In the “The Achievement of Desire” and “Para Teresa” Richard Rodriguez and Inez Avila describe the troubles of balancing life at home and at school. Rodriguez conveys the difficulties he had to face separating from his own culture to achieve academic success. His article portrays the cultural world and the educational world as separate institutions that cannot coexist in America. Throughout his text Rodriguez provides detailed experiences in order to explain his thought process. Inez Avila however presents her article as a letter dedicated to a school bully. In contrast to Rodriguez perspective Avila wrote her poem in English and Spanish to appeal to Mexican -American culture. She walks the reader through an argument between her and a fellow classmate as she was cornered in a bathroom. Her poem depicts how children who share the same culture discriminate within their own community. Both these articles are told from a Latino-American point of view yet they radically differ from each other.

A large similarity between the two works of literature consist of the journey of breaking certain standards of education particularly in people of color. In the essay “Superman and Me,” Alexie grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation where to a non-Indian adult the expectation of the Indian students were very low. With these exceptions set at such a low standard the desire to give students a proper education were extremely limited. The students, as Alexie says, “struggled with basic reading,” and overall, “were expected

No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” Unfortunately Native Americans have deep roots with racism and oppression during the last 500 years. “In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven,” Sherman Alexie tries to show racism in many ways in multiple of his short stories. These stories, engage our history from a Native American viewpoint. Many Native Americans were brutally forced out of their homes and onto Reservations that lacked resources. Later, Indian children were taken from their families and placed into school that were designed to, “Kill the Indian, save the man.” In the book there are multiple short story that are pieces that form a larger puzzle that shows the struggles and their effects on Native Americans. Sherman Alexie shows the many sides of racism, unfair justice and extermination policies and how imagination is key for Native American survival.

In “The Joy of Reading and Writing : Superman and Me” published in the Los Angeles Times, Sherman Alexie brings attention to the cultural divide between Indians and non - Indians, specifically in the area of education. Alexie uses himself as the example in the article, a “Spokane Indian boy” who lives on the reservation. Alexie chose to mimic his father's love for books, because of that he taught himself to read at a very young age. He learned to read by looking at the pictures in a Superman comic book. After teaching himself he “advances quickly”, unlike other kids he is able to read “Grapes of Wrath in kindergarten”. If he hadn’t been an Indian boy he may have been called a “prodigy” but he was so instead he was an “oddity”. At this point in the article Alexie brings us out of his past as a child and into his present as an educated Indian man. Much to his surprise he has become a writer. He says, “I visit schools and teach creative writing to Indian kids”. Alexie talks about how Indian children have lower