The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez

1. In "Scholarship Boy", Richard Rodriquez uses this term to describe his personal experience with education from childhood to adulthood. Rodriquez describes a scholarship boy as a person who has two completely different realities occurring at the same time, and for him the two realities are home and school. Throughout his childhood, Rodriguez believed that a complete switch from school life to home life was ideal for being academically successful. He recalls valuing his school teachers more than his parents most times. At times, he was even embarrassed of the lack of education his parents had; they were working-class people, and they never learned English fully. One of the main purposes of the narratives was to show readers that they can become educated from any background. Despite not agreeing with some of the methods Rodriquez used growing up to become educated, it still serves purpose to show that anyone can become successful if they just focus on the thing they want to achieve.

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

High school is an important time for developing a sense of who you are as a person. Each kid who starts out high school will usually asks themselves what they are there to accomplish. For the most part, many set personal goals for themselves and strive to achieve above and beyond. However, some are just there for the experience and to see where it takes them. It’s apparent that some kids have an easier time and don’t have to struggle with their high school career. For example, some of the students have followed strong academic paths that have prepared them for this time in their lives, where as others have struggled with educational influences and feel unprepared or lost. Swerdlow mentions that the students, who attend J.E.B. Stuart, are given many chances to improve their educational foundation in order to

Many of us are very family oriented and believe that family should always be present in our life no matter what do in life. While some of us feel that, our desire is worth more important than family due to the lack of communication with family members. In the “Achievement of Desire” by Richard Rodriguez, Rodriguez recalls some of the difficulties he had at a young age, which was balancing his life academically and practicing the Mexican traditions. His desire was more important to him than his family because communication with his family was not as strong as before when he began to get more involved in his education, which separates him from his family mentally and physically.

When Rodriguez is in London, he reads Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, and is able to see himself in the essay. We see that he gains a “sociological imagination” and that he realizes that he fits the definition of the “scholarship boy” when he says that he “realized that there were other students” (517) like him. Hoggart says that this type of student must be “more and more alone” (517) in order to succeed, and that this student must “cut himself off mentally, so as to do his homework, as well as he can” (517). Rodriguez shows us that he not only grasps what the “scholarship boy” is, but he also understands what the “scholarship boy” goes through because of personal experience. Although he agrees with Hoggart’s definition, Rodriguez also adds to the meaning of the “scholarship boy” by giving his readers the insight of exactly what they go through, how they think, and why they do what they do. For example, he shows readers that he is forced to be “more and more alone” (517) by writing about how his relationship with his parents is weakened, and how the books he reads makes him feel lonelier. This insight not only asserts Hoggart’s definition of the “scholarship boy,” but also lengthens and specifies it.

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.

Today’s society sees college as a very fundamental step to obtaining success. Carmen Lugo-Lugo argues that instead of being focused on education, college is beginning to convert into a marketplace and a business. She states that colleges are now more interested in making a profit from their students than the actual education they are there for. Due to this mindset, the flow of the classroom environment and how students treat professors is affected. She also makes it known how prevalent systematic racism and racial profiling exist and tells the readers by her first hand accounts. In her essay “A Prostitute, A Servant, And A Customer-Service Representative: A Latina in Academia”, Associate Professor in the Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies, Carmen Lugo-Lugo uses emotion and language to communicate her claim. Throughout her writing she demonstrates strong emotion-evoking words, and hyperboles.

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.

Leading a meaningful life meant breaking away from the fear of criticism or rejection; conforming to society limits Illgunas’ definition of life. Illgunas’ suburban upbringing makes the danger of social conformity clear to him. Surrendering to society would consequently cause him to completely lose himself. After graduating from high school, Illgunas and his classmates follow the conventional path towards a higher education. Illgunas explains, “My high school class and I moved like a school of fish: we graduates were capable of going off on our own, in whatever direction we chose, but something demanded we all swim as one…” (6-7). Parallel to the claim Illgunas makes, graduates that do not attend college are stigmatized. Society has created a paradigm: after graduating high school, students should attend a traditional four year university, and then enter the “career world.” In Illgunas’ perspective, people in

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

I can relate to what Rodriguez was feeling; school has changed me I have a different perspective on life than I did before. I no longer want to just hang out with friends like I use to, I honestly rather be at home with my own family. I have also made it my life goal to change who I am for the better; I have been around lots of people and I’ve been able to see different takes on life at all types of angles. I want to create a better angle for my family; I’m working hard in school to be able to provide this life that I can only dream of right now.

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

The idea that information is “deposited” from a teacher into a student fits the majority of Rodriguez’s educational experiences. As a young child, Rodriguez feels that “books were going to make [him] educated” (Rodriguez 578). He never questioned what he was told by his teachers or what he read in any book. He didn’t develop ideas of his own or any critical thinking skills. Rodriguez says that he was “a great mimic; a collector of thoughts, not a thinker; the very last person in class who ever feels obliged to have an opinion of his own” (Rodriguez 581). This type of education helps us to understand the relationships Rodriguez had with his “mentor” Richard Hoggart, as well as his school teachers and parents.