The Relationship Between Richard Rodriguez and Richard Hoggart - Essay Example

Look at the relationship between Richard Rodriguez and Richard Hoggart as a case study of the relation of a reader to a or a to a teacher. Look closely at Rodriguezs reference to Hoggarts book, "The Uses of Literacy", and at the way Rodriguez made use of that book to name and describe his own experience as a student. What did he find in the book? How did he use it? How did he use it in his own writing? What was revealed about Rodriguezs character through his usage of quotes? The essayist Richard Rodriguez has written extensively on the experiences of the “scholarship boy,” the boy from a provincial or working-class background who is forced out of the working class rank because of the education process. In his exploration of these theme, Rodriguez frequently cited the British educator Richard Hoggart, particularly in describing the “neutralization” of accent and attitude that often occurs and the bi-polar world as the scholarship-boy is forced to inhabit. In the course of his reading of The Uses of Literacy, it would seem that Rodriguez found solace and self-understanding in Hoggart’s concept of the scholarship boy. Rodriguez interpreted his own life, or in a way imposes upon the reader some semblance of structure to his own life, by using Hoggart’s concept of the scholarship boy. In using Richard Hoggart’s definition in The Uses of Literacy of the scholarship boy - the working class, whose members are for the most part destined to academic failure - here is how Rodriguez (1983) defined it in his terms in his book, The Achievement of Desire: The child is “moderately endowed,” intellectually mediocre, Hoggart supposes – though it may be more pertinent to note the special qualities of temperament in the child. High-strung child. Brooding. Sensitive. Haunted by the knowledge that one chooses to become a student. (Education is not an inevitable or natural step in growing up.) Here is a child who cannot forget that his academic success distances him from a life he loved, even from his own memory of himself. (par. 13) As in his works, Rodriguez would detail how he marveled that for the first time he had found that there are also other students like him and that this made him come to terms with his plight. With Hoggart’s help, Rodriguez understood a kind of multiculturalism wherein the translation of difference means shedding one identity in favor of another as the student moves between worlds that are at cultural extremes. In his reading of Hoggart, he commented that what Hoggart “grasps very well is that the scholarship boy must move between environments, his home and the classroom,” (par. 8) which are cultural at odds with each other. This led Rodriguez to his point out a view that lead to the assimilation of the marginalized into the mainstream and the loss of intimacy to one’s own culture, such as a first language. In his reconstruction of his early life in The Achievement of Desire, he moves from the intimacy and security of his Latino heritage to the American middle class education, moving from his home to the school – two locations that have very different conceptions of time and space. With Hoggart, he is able to view his past in a less harsh terms and perhaps a little more optimism that some gaps can be filled and guilt, lessened. Through the scholarship boy, Rodriguez was able to tell his experience, first when he encountered his first childhood crisis as he started studying his elementary education in a school that carried a more modern and secular environment than his home. The teachers and students were part of a seemingly alien blur of modernity that is too different from the cocooned place he had grown in. In his interactions with them, he gradually transformed from a working class Mexican-American student to a middle-class American and that the scholarship-boy-phase began. With Hoggart’s scholarship boy, Rodriguez at last found a depiction of his experiences. Rodriguez was able to narrate a conscious decision to repress his working-class Latino roots and to become the exception and succeed as one of the others. In his narrative, Rodriguez underscored that it alienated him from his parents and his culture. There were less and less communication between parents and the children in the household as Rodriguez and his siblings learn more English and receive more education in the American school. In addition, there was a conscious attempt at shunning anything that reminds him of his past and his longing for it. “I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers.” (par. 19) During the course of his education, he became an exemplary scholarship boy achieving a peak in academics but it was during this time when another crossroads would emerge. His success as a scholar became precarious because he felt that he has not successfully entered the community of academics and that it didn’t seem to hold any more allure. As he turned his back to the academia, he became suddenly aware of what he lost. As he assimilated himself to the mainstream, he pushed his parents and all that they represent to a distance that might never be bridged. It is important to underscore that Hoggart played a major role in shaping most of Rodriguez’s ideas, his quotes on Hoggart most importantly tells us that he used the latter’s ideas to illustrate the impact of his primary education rather than an affirmation of Hoggart’s perspectives on education. Rodriguez became known to be critical of the scholarship boy’s erasure of authentic accent and eventually branding him as a bad student or a mere collector of thought and not a thinker. From here, one could see that Hoggart did not merely provide Rodriguez some form of template for his younger self. Hoggart helped him understand himself and the flaws of Hoggart’s scholarship boy in itself. However, Rodriguez surmised that being a scholarship boy also allowed him to think abstractly and conceptually about himself and his parents. “The ability to consider experience so abstractly allowed me to shape into desire what would otherwise have remained indefinite, meaningless longing in the British Museum. If, because of my schooling, I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caring about that fact.” (par. 43) Through Hoggart, Rodriguez suggested that the best way for students, particularly those who have the same experience as he had, in coping with their sense of guilt with the idea of consenting to betray their past is to view the whole experience as a consequence of the dynamics of education and language. There is politics to it and some aspects may be inevitable in the process of assimilation that takes place within a multicultural society. His is the development that he brings to Hoggart’s scholarship boy model. For example, if a students is encouraged to pay attention to how different and diverging discourses hinder one’s alignments with different points of view and social groups, then it would be easier for a student to resist the pressures of the school and their peers to their existing set of views, values and beliefs. In comparing the scholarship boy concept from Hoggart and Rodriguez’s perspective, one will undoubtedly find in the latter stronger arguments. Most important of all is that he has lived the characterization of the scholarship boy and that he has improved on it to develop a post-scholarship boy, one that is healthy and a postmodern version, incorporating all of America’s diverse cultural forms and public identities. It allowed Rodriguez to address his own existential condition as a being who is caught between two American cultural forms. For example, he could take pride of his brown skin; he could deal with his guilt for not embodying the Hispanic macho ideal; admit his sexual anxieties and physical insecurities, among others. All could coexist providing him the tools to define his own life according to his own lived experiences. Work Cited Rodriguez, Richard. “The Achievement of Desire.” Ways of Reading: AN ANTHOLOGY FOR WRITERS. Eighth Ed. Read More