The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez Analysis

The Achievement of Desire recounts Richard Rodriguez’s life as a student and learner; the writing stresses the importance of a formal education, how it influences one’s experience, and how learning is implemented into one’s life. Rodriguez, although his experiences are rather unique, instills in his readers a sense of understanding; all students have a way of relating to what he went through, no matter how small, as well as how he later discovered his mistakes and the toll they took on his personal growth. Rodriguez illustrates to his readers that education is more than passively sitting in a desk and digesting ideas that are thrown at you; his unique ways of pulling aspects into his life, as well as eliminating some, has impacted his lifelong

By setting himself up to be present to study, Rodriguez thought he was progressing and growing himself as a learner. As it turned out, the opposite was true, as he later admits in his essay. School for Rodriguez meant that he should sit quietly and learn, absorb the ideas sputtered by his instructors, and retain them in his memory for later use. In actuality, this hurt Rodriguez more than it helped. As he muses at the end of his essay, his education, or maybe his lack thereof, gave him the ability to care about what he missed while he was busy “learning”. Some of these opportunities are subtly addressed by his mother; she urges him to get the best education he can for himself, but later complains about him moving so far away to attend Stanford. In her own way, she is showing him that there is more to education than regurgitating ideas and digesting them as the one true answer. Essentially, Rodriguez is admitting to himself and his readers that he wasted a large number of opportunities to put his learning into practice, which sets the tone for his regrets later in life. Ultimately, as he aged, he sees the real meaning of education, but also “the end of education”

Rodriguez reminisces his times spent in school and how they have affected his life, both positively and negatively; he has discovered that by leaving his family for school work he has left behind a pivotal part of his personal education, which is arguably just as important as formal education. He also tells about how he viewed his teachers much more highly than his parents, as though they were the only people that you can learn from. What he failed to see until it was too late was that his parents had just as much to teach him as his college professors. Rodriguez sees his faults ultimately because he is educated, a rather strange paradox. Without his ability to appreciate his “scholarship boy” education, he would not be able to appreciate all the sacrifices his parents made to ensure that he was happy in his ability to learn. Rodriguez shares with his readers a common challenge for all students: to find a delicate balance between our types of learning. Students who have had the opportunity to have a formal education know this type of balance all too well as they slowly separate themselves from home life and strive to think and be more like their peers. Rodriguez shares the idea that there is so much more to education that sitting in a desk waiting to be spoon-fed information. All of Rodriguez’s decisions, all decisions of students in general, come at a cost; the cost sometimes