Rodriguez's Achievement Of Desire, By Richard Rodriguez

In the essay “Achievement of Desire”, author Richard Rodriguez, describes the story of our common experience such as growing up, leaving home, receiving an education, and joining the world. As a child, Rodriguez lived the life of an average teenager raised in the stereotypical student coming from a working class family. With the exception, Rodriguez was always top of his class, and he always spent time reading books or studying rather than spending time with his family or friends. This approach makes Rodriguez stand out as an exceptional student, but with time he becomes an outsider at home and in school. Rodriguez describes himself as a “scholarship boy” meaning that because of the scholarships and grants that he was receiving to attend school; there was much more of an expectation for him to acquire the best grades and the highest scores. Rodriguez suggests that the common college student struggles the way he did because when a student begins college, they forget “the life [they] enjoyed

There may not be much that the education system can do about it, but the students need to understand that the quest for knowledge will never truly end. Students need to “[turn] unafraid to desire the past, and thereby [achieve] what had eluded [them] for so long-- the end of education”(355). This means that students need to understand their goals for learning, end formal education at those goals and use life to teach them the rest. Until a “scholarship boy” realizes that their education has been a mimic of thoughts that someone else has instilled in their mind they will not truly be learning as a thinker or self-opinionated person. When they end their formal education only learning from life, then they will begin to learn how to problem solve and what their opinions may be in particular