'Achievement Of Desire' By Richard Rodriguez

In the article, “Achievement of Desire” by Richard Rodriguez, starts to discuss the conflict of scholarship boy between school life and his home life. When he starts to make progress in his education, he was becoming discouraged and embarrassed of his parents lack of education. Rodriguez admits his success is due to never forgetting his life before he became a scholarship boy, yet the new change that came from getting an education. After reading this article, I would have to agree with certain parts Rodriguez has to say, yet disagree after realizing individuals who take the values of academic culture will start to experience alienation from native communities.

Richard Rodriguez describes the difficulties between balancing life in the academic world and life of a working class family. In this

Not till he was thirty years old he started to think for a reason for his academic success. He wanted to find other students like him so after reading Richard Hoggart’s “The Uses of Literacy” he found out the explanation of scholarship boy and registers there were other students like himself. Hoggart’s, states that a scholarship boy needs to, “move between environments, his home and the classroom, which are at cultural extremes, opposed. With his family, the boy has the intense pleasure of intimacy, the family’s consolation in feeling public alienation.” (p. 184, line 9). Scholarship boy is a student who comes from a lower, working-class family. When coming to a new environment they start to isolate themselves from family in order to concentrate on their studies in order to obtain a high-quality education which is the most importance to them. It’s easy to see young children might get caught up in their parent’s situations and noticing they are barely scraping by, yet when they are in school this is one place they can guarantee a future for a better