The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez

Miller asked a question in his text, The Dark Night of the Soul, which is asked on numerous occasions. ‘What might the Literate Arts be good for?’ Miller gives situations and reasons why we could say the Literate Arts are useless in today’s world. What might the Literate Arts be good for? I ask this question a lot nowadays too. When I go for an English class or see literary books, the question creeps into my mind unconsciously. In this modern world ‘reading and writing’ have gone downhill and yet people do not seem bothered or affected by it which makes the doubt in literary power even stronger. But after a lot of thinking and research, I have come to realize that literate arts are still needed in

In his essay, “The Achievement of Desire,” Richard Rodriguez informs readers that he was a scholarship boy throughout his educational career. He uses his own personal experiences, as well as Richard Hoggart’s definition of the “scholarship boy,” to describe himself as someone who constantly struggles with balancing his life between family and education, and ends up on the side of education. In recognizing himself as a “scholarship boy,” he shows that he has gained what sociologist C. Wright Mills terms the “sociological imagination,” which “enables its possessor to understand the larger

To fully comprehend a work you cannot just read it. You must read it, analyze it, question it, and even then question what you are questioning. In Richard Rodriguez’s The Achievement of Desire we are presented with a young Richard Rodriguez and follow him from the start of his education until he is an adult finally having reached his goals. In reference to the way he reads for the majority of his education, it can be said he reads going with the grain, while he reads a large volume of books, the quality of his reading is lacking.

Lubrano explains how middle-class children understand the importance of receiving higher education, while working-class children fail to see the purpose of preparing for a higher level in the short term. According to Lubrano, “Middle-class kids are groomed for another life” (534). Author Patrick Finn states, “Working-class kids see no such connection, understand no future life for which digesting Shakespeare might be of value” (534). In answering this question, Lubrano must look at the various circumstances that account for the poor performances among working-class individuals, the supportive relationships middle-class students have with their parents and teachers, and how children of working-class parents struggle when preparing for later life. In the address, Alfred Lubrano must address the difference in treatment between working-class and middle-class children attending

Lareau, in Unequal Childhoods, focuses on socioeconomic status and how that affects outcomes in the education system and the workplace. While examining middle-class, working-class and poor families, Lareau witnessed differing logics of parenting, which could greatly determine a child’s future success. Working-class and poor families allow their children an accomplishment of natural growth, whereas middle-class parents prepare their children through concerted cultivation. The latter provides children with a sense of entitlement, as parents encourage them to negotiate and challenge those in authority. Parents almost overwhelm their children with organized activities, as we witnessed in the life of Garrett Tallinger. Due to his parents and their economic and cultural capital, Garrett was not only able to learn in an educational setting, but through differing activities, equipping him with several skills to be successful in the world. Lareau suggests these extra skills allow children to “think of themselves as special and as entitled to receive certain kinds of services from adults” (39). Adults in the school system are in favor of these skills through concerted cultivation, and Bourdieu seems to suggest that schools can often misrecognize these skills as natural talent/abilities when it’s merely cultivated through capital. This then leads to inequalities in the education system and academic attainments.

In the narrative called ‘Scholarship Boy’, by Richard Rodriguez. One can say that the biggest turning point is when Mr. Rodriguez himself realizes, at the age of thirty. The biggest attribute to his success and determination is schooling as a young boy. This is when Mr. Rodriguez had to live two separate lives. One as a young boy eager and willing to learn and develop, and another as a son and sibling to his family. At the age of thirty he finally is able to come to terms with this fact and be able to talk about in public and not have to keep it bottled up any longer. During this time in his life he is writing his dissertation and finds a written piece by Richard Hoggarts called, ‘The Scholarship Boy’. At this point in his life he sees that he is not alone with his life struggles. This was figuratively like lifting weights off of Mr. Rodriguez’s shoulders, you can see how while telling this part of the story stress is taken off of him. It is interesting to see that during the entire narrative Mr. Rodriguez seems unappreciative and ungrateful for the life his parents had given him. He is obviously resentful to the idea that his parents didn’t appreciate or value the idea of education, or at the very least learning the primary language of a country they moved to. Nothing in the story states that they were ignorant parents and didn’t know how to do simple math, the struggle that kept his parents from being able to give Mr. Rodriguez the attention and affection but most of all

In “The Shock of Education: How College Corrupts” Alfred Lubrano uses his personal experience with college education and his parents to come up with the statement that “Every bit of learning takes you further from your parents". In his writing, he goes over how his eyes were first opened to the idea that school could bring you further from your parents, when he read a book titled “Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez”, where the writer was quoted as saying “Home life is in the now, school life exists on an altogether different lane, with an eye towards the future.” Alfred’s belief throughout his article is that school brings you to a reality that separates and distances you from your parents and home-life.

Mike Rose in his piece I Just Wanna be Average and Richard Rodriguez in Achievement of Desire approach the subject of education from the view point of the uninspired and highly motivated student respectively. Both authors examine the importance of teacher expectations on achievement, and the role school and home environment plays in academic success.

In his writing The Achievement of Desire, Richard Rodriguez describes his pursuit of academic achievement as a way to distance himself from his family as well as his cultural roots: “… A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that school was changing me and separating me from the life

Education is an ongoing process that one can never escape form. Whether if it is in an educational institution, exploring a new topic in the news, or hearing about different cultures, global or local, education fails at being able to completely leave someone alone. However, an end of education also depends on how someone defines it. Rodriguez defines learning as a desire to escape. It is an escape from family by abstracting himself from normal family/home habits - “he takes his first step toward academic success, away from his family,” (page 341). It is an escape from the life everyone expects of him especially being from a working class family to excel beyond the primary education his parents have had set for him, “He cannot afford to admire his parents,” (page 341). This “habit of abstracting from immediate experience” encloses Rodriguez in his lonely environment that he once craved into a community where communication between a reader and writer is nonexistent. By doing so he makes education and learning a chore or a task to strain to be

Maintaining relationships and and focusing on who is important is one way in which I try to combat becoming Hoggart’s definition of a “scholarship boy.” Throughout the excerpt, Rodriguez keeps reiterating the fact that while his schooling grew more intense and successful, he “couldn’t forget that [it] was changing [him] and separating [him] from the life [he] enjoyed before becoming a student” (Rodriguez 534). When I was in high school, I had two major relationships I had to maintain: family and friends. With numerous extra curriculars, rigorous courses, and a part-time job, this was hard at times. According to Haley Bess, these difficulties constitute “the lows” of high school; however, “having to balance a busy schedule...helps you learn time management” (Bess 2,3). On the other hand, Rodriguez would “spend more and more time studying...enclosing himself in the silence permitted and required by intense concentration,” (Rodriguez 536) separating himself from his family. I remember moments in which my Mom or Dad inquired about my day at school, and I had so much on my mind that I threw the questions to the side. Although, in these same moments I knew eventually, I would have to tell them. When the time was right, I updated my parents, and this made our relationship more connected and allow them to feel a part of the education that they are gifting to me. For example, instead of reading a book and keeping my reactions to myself like

Gary Soto, who among many things was a Mexican-American poet, many times wrote about what he knew best: his life. Growing up as a Chicano in America in the 50s and 60s, Soto worked in fields as a laborer from a young age. It is evident that coming from a Hispanic working class family greatly influenced his poem “Ambition”. As he is known for, Soto's poem is filled with imagery of everyday life, while harping on important details and themes of things that he may have seen around him., but in this instance, there was a bit of confusion. To begin with, the poem “Ambition” starts off with the line "For years our ambition was to eat/Chicken"(1-2). Without further analysis, at this point the reader is most likely confused, much like I was. Chicken? How could eating be one's goal, one's aspiration in life? The word ambition is usually associated with lofty goals. It would not seem out of place to say that one's ambition was to become a doctor or to make a better life for oneself. So the speaker in the poem could not truly believe that all that he wanted in life was to eat chicken. The outlandishness of this statement seems to be the speaker pointing huge arrows towards places in the poem that invoke deeper meaning to

Working to reach a certain success in one’s life is difficult enough to pressure one into accommodating themselves into a life that lacks social interaction. However, situations can become even more tedious and challenging when one is too focused on one form of success and achievement to realize that the cost for that success is losing the experience within another area of one’s life. This idea is demonstrated in the essay “Achievement of Desire”, where author Richard Rodriguez, describes the challenge of balancing his time spent in his academic life and his social life with, in his case, a family and school community. In his essay, Rodriguez demonstrates that during his life as a young child, he reached academic success at a rate that contradicted the expectations that society had for a child who derived from a struggling working class family. In the beginning of his essay, Ramirez informs the audience that english was not his first language when he writes “the boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak english, twenty years later concluded his studies in the stately quiet of the reading room in the British Museum,” (Rodriguez, pg. 533). This emphasizes the idea that Rodriguez was an exception from the common archetype that categorizes non-English speakers in an English-dominated environment be much less successful. However, Rodriguez rebuttals this stereotype by mentioning his eagerness for academic knowledge when he states that he was always top of his class. Rodriguez also emphasizes that instead of spending his time out practicing his social success with friends or with his family he would stay at home and read his books, letting his academic life invade the rest of his life. At first, Rodriguez presents his success in academics as something exceptional to take positive note on when he describes the pride and encouragement he received from people. Despite his positive approach to his success in school Rodriguez soon demonstrates the results of his eagerness to succeed, when he becomes isolated at home and in school (which he was not aware of until much later in his life). More so, the essay Rodriguez writes shows a scholar too anxious to learn and his struggle with trying to keep his success

Richard Rodriguez and Paolo Freire write of education as the core factor in one’s life. They feel that education itself lends people to either “achieve” greatness or fall into the majority of “bankers.” “The Achievement of Desire” by Rodriguez and “The Banking Concept of Education” by Freire greatly resemble each other; however, they also differ on some points. Despite their differences, both texts come to the same conclusion – education makes a person who he/she can become.

Reading the Dante Alighieri case, I was struck with the similarities between these parents and the mother in the case who did not want her daughter’s education sacrificed for the sake of someone else’s social values. But I sympathised with the parents’ concerns about losing out because both within the microcosm of Vance as well as within Charlotte at large you find “education that is highly stratified and unequally distributed.”