The Achievement Desire by Richard Rodriguez - Essay Example

English The Achievement Desire by Richard Rodriguez Rodriguez tries to prove that personal life, school, and ambition should bebalanced correctly. Being a scholarship student, Rodriguez is fascinated to learn lots by reading books. He was always active in class and often read a book. The fact that he comes from a middle-class family, of Mexican ancestry, raises controversy on his relation to his parents. The parents were trivially educated and had struggled so much to pull through to the position they were in, socially. His parents were nifty and always encouraged him to work hard in school. As well, his siblings were smart in school, though he felt that he was wholly by himself. In his essay, Rodriguez admits that he despised his parents on educational grounds. Even so, the cultural separation, brought about through education, dawns to him later on while he was undertaking his studies in graduate school. Education had distanced him from his family life. Inability to balance between personal life ambition and school can be tragic. As Hoggart puts it, a scholarship kind presents a “friction point of two cultures” (Rodriguez 540). Rodriguez comes from a family background consisting of barely educated middle-class parents and enrolling into the school, as a scholarship student, makes up an entry in a novel environment. He admits to have forgotten where he came from (598). He is too ambitious in achieving academic success that he distances himself from his ‘helpless’ family. The inability to balance his school life, ambition and family life caused him guilt and shame. For Rodriguez, he chose school over his family. Personally, I can relate to Rodriguez circumstances, given the situational similarities thereof. As Latino Puerto Rican, I happen to come from a low-class family, just like Rodriguez. When I awarded a scholarship for my studies, with the difficulty in affording school, I was filled with anxiety of success since this was an exceptional chance at hand. To achieve this, I needed support and help from my parents. However, when the parents fail to keep up with the standards of support one requires, other options are sought. Intrinsically, the teachers are the next most feasible replacement for the parents in regards to support. I did what Rodriguez refers to as “a transfer of allegiance that previously given to the parents, to the new figure of authority, the teacher” (600). The new environment of school got me exposed to peer pressure, from other students from high-class families, and bullying due to the fact that I was on scholarship. The situation rendered me unable to play a sport; rather I concentrated on achieving academic success. Rodriguez’s parents failed to match with his ‘expectations’ as pertaining to help. In his essay, he vividly remembers when his father re-read the instructions of an assignment over and over. This makes Rodriguez sad and he grabs the assignment from his father’s hands and promises to work it out by himself (598). In a similar manner, he is sad when he recommends a book to his mother, only to realize that she had only managed to complete a few pages after several weeks (602). He thought this was an opportunity to connect with his mother but the failure to read the book infuriated him to a point of nearly weeping. His parents contradicted majorly with what he was taught by his teachers (603). Education has inculcated, on him, a whole new perception towards his parents. Mary Louise Pratt, in her article “Arts of Contact Zone”, tackles similar situations in her bid to explicate the concept of contact zones. She gives an example of a Stanford University’s course that involved students of diverse values, ideas and cultural backgrounds, just like Rodriguez when he joined school for the first time. After being taught about the different perspectives that various people hold on one’s culture, ideas and views, the students appreciated the importance of wisdom and understanding that comes with a contact zone, despite being hungered. Pratt likened this situation to a safe house where people’s feelings are validated rather than challenged. Contrary to the contact zone, the safe house reaffirms a person’s identity in preparation for reentry into the contact zone. In essence, Pratt alludes to the appreciation of one’s culture in order to be able to interact comfortably with people of other cultural backgrounds (Arts of the contact Zone). Rodriguez was ashamed of his uneducated parents got disillusioned to a point of answering them spitefully when they dared to ask about his advancements in school (623). Pratt asserts that instructors should facilitate the student’s personal identity by enlightening them on the disparities that exist in culture, ideas and views. Intrinsically, the instructors at Rodriguez’s school failed in this, forcing him to be hooked to books, rather than playing with his friends, in pursuit of a successful life that was different from that of his parents (549). His cultural background of uneducated parents caused him embarrassment and turned him into a book zombie. Ironically, Rodriguez does not attain his goal of being ‘knowledgeable’. As he mentions in his essay, he is, “the great mimic; a collector of thoughts, not a thinker; the very last person in class to have an opinion of his own” (560) rather than apprehending his studies. A scholarship student does not embrace the fact that knowledge is not limited to knowing the answer to two plus two. In his quest for success, he misses the success’s true meaning by striving “to be like his teachers, to possess their knowledge, to assume their authority, their confidence, even to assume a teacher’s persona (552). While in high school, he admitted to his mother that he wanted to be a teacher someday, something that seemed to please her mother. However, in the back of his mind, he wanted to be like his teachers by even mimicking their accents and personas (604). Knowledge is not about adopting someone’s way of doing things, but understanding everything before emulating, while thinking outside the box. Paulo Freire endorses these sentiments in his bid to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the education system. In his essay “The Banking Concept of Education”, Freire depicts instructors as oppressors whose main objective is to fill the ‘containers’, students. He continues to add that the education system is kept stagnant since the ‘oppressors’ are contented with it since it enables them manipulate the ‘containers’ easily after barring their chances of being creative (218). Rodriguez’s mimicking of the instructors, in almost every aspect, can be subjected to the same reasoning. Students ought to come out of school, during graduations, as free thinking human beings and not otherwise. Freire suggests ‘problem-posing’ (Freire 224) mechanism, which involves the instructor in discussion, as the sure way to go through this educational shortcoming. In the course of these discussions, the students learn from the instructor and the instructor learns from the students as well. Finally, there is a sense of perseverance. On graduating from college, it dawned to him that he lacks something vital that he often ignored over the years. It was arduous to concede to this fact to both him and the critics who praised him over his success with a ‘Your parents must be very proud’ face (598). A look back at his academic life revealed that the things he avoided emerged to be very salient in his life. With a nostalgic mind, he rues the many years he has lost in his academic endeavors at the expense of a ‘real life’. In other terms, he gets an epiphany. As Mills puts it, Rodriguez had a ‘sociological imagination’. According to Mills, a person is said to have sociological imaginations when he understands his personal experience and then uses it to judge his own fate through “locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances” ( Scott and Ann 11).Rodriguez gets to apprehend the salience of his home life when he realizes that under the company of other scholars, they were ordinary people only that they were “worn with long study” in a “lonely community” (530). Indeed, knowledge encompasses myriad factors, whereby academics constitute just a fraction. Conclusion Rodriguez tries to prove that personal life, school and ambition should be balanced correctly. In his attempt to advance and distance himself from the, nearly illiterate, parents, he loses the entire self-sense and personal identity, which makes him lonely and sad. Other authors concur with this sentiment of cultural clash and self-identity. Parents bear great amounts of values and wisdom that should be passed on to the children, over and above the data taught in school. They have more experience in life, in spite of not being academically fortunate, and to avoid their prior mistakes, children should pay heed to their advice. Education ought to act as a supplement to ones upbringing and not a substitution thereof. A fair balance should be taken between academics and the home life. Until that is done, the society will be filled with academic zombies. Works Cited Freire, Paulo. "The "Banking" Concept of Education." Bartholomae, David, Anthony Petrosky and Stacey Waite. Ways of Reading An Anthology for Writers. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2014. Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone." From Ways of Reading. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petroksky. 5th. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 1999 Richard, Rodriguez. . "The Achievement of Desire". From Ways of Reading. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petroksky. 7th. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2005. Scott, John, and Ann Nilsen. C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination: Contemporary Perspectives. 2013. Internet resource. Read More