Summary Of The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez

Some may ask the question…Is there really a balanced that can be gained between home and school life? We are all different types of people and come from different types of family’s. Some parents stress upon their children how big education is and how important it is to be successful in life. On the other hand some parents don’t really care that much about education because they are not really educated themselves and find it hard to help their children build on their education. ‘The Achievement of Desire” by Richard Rodriguez is a perfect example of how his home life really impacted his education and caused him to turn his back on his family, simply because they weren’t very educated. It also indulges you in the trials and tribulations Rodriguez

Rodriguez seems to blame most of his inabilities to be comfortable in either his home life or his school life on the affect that his time in school had. Rodriguez uses the term “scholarship boy” to describe the type of student and person he started to become during his time in school. The “scholarship boy” is described by the renowned professor Hoggart “Scholarship boy: good student, troubled son. The child is moderately endowed, intellectually mediocre….must move between environments, his home and classroom, which are at cultural extremes oppose. With his family, the boy has the intense pleasure of intimacy the family’s consolation in feelings public alienation……” He unfortunately believed that his short comings in school had made him into a horrible and miserable person, unable to live content in either home or school and formulate his own opinions. He found himself idolizing his teachers in a way that intrigued him toward wanting more

On the first page of the essay, Rodriguez remarks that his elementary teachers where very invested in his success as a student (338). A teacher’s praise of Rodriguez complete loss of his Spanish accent is the type of acknowledgement that Rodriguez began to enjoy. “Proudly I announced…. That a teacher said I was losing all traces of a Spanish accent” (Rodriguez 339). Rodriguez, like many others would, began to enjoy achievements that could only be experienced by going through school. The longing for this praise became the root of desire in the classroom and at home. However this new – found education was beginning to change Rodriguez; He was becoming out of touch with his family life and began to get lost into school life. Rodriguez believes that this new realization of this was a major factor in his new appearance of a Scholarship boy; “A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from life I enjoyed before I became a student.” The scholarship boy is one of the few children that realize the effect school is having on them which develops a “lack of