The Achievement Of Desire, By Richard Rodriguez

Rarely does one keep the same outlook for their whole life. Ideas and people are molded and reformed in the crucible of life. Often times, one is unaware that they are even being changed at all. In The Achievement of Desire, Rodriguez chronicles, from the perspective of the man he is now, the changes brought upon by education that shaped him, and the price associated with those changes. It was a price that he couldn't put his finger on at the time which makes it harder to have concrete opinions about it. Without any words to describe what he has lost, it is almost as if nothing has been lost, except for the inescapable feeling that something has been lost. He simply lacks any way to talk about it and bridge the gap between the situation and

how he perceives it.

Curiously, it is delving further into education, the process that separated Rodriguez from his family that ends up giving him the means to appreciate and talk about what he lost.

Something that Rodriguez was acutely aware of since a young age was the separation between him and his family. When he is very young he comes home and scolds his parents about grammar. When he is a few years older he knows better than to pedantically correct his parents. At school, he is taught the virtues of reading and reason, while at home, there is no reading for pleasure and intimacy and closeness is values. This separation widens the further he progresses in his educational career. However, as a child, he has neither the words nor the capacity to truly understand the separation that is occurring. He idolizes his teachers and works to emulate them in his speech and values. As he grows to admire his instructors, his admiration for his parents wanes. His parents serve to remind him of who he was, who he can not be if he is to continue with his education. Therefore, he substitutes his teachers for his parents as the object of his admiration. His teachers have all of the answers and his

parents are stupid. However, he is unable to completely distance himself from his parents; he feels ashamed of his parents but also aware of and guilty for the shame. Looking back, he is able to realize that his parents allowed for the separation. They were supportive of him in his endeavors; they spoke English at home and paid to send him and his siblings to good schools. His mother was open with her pride for him unlike his father who was more reserved. Despite their encouragement, Rodriguez makes clear that they did resent the fact that their family was growing apart. His mother is displeased that he will be going to a far-away college, but when it is time for him to leave she makes no fuss. His parents were not without ambition, but they lacked the education required to succeed, which is something they wouldn’t deny their children. As an adolescent Rodriquez is unable to appreciate his parents’ lifestyle though he later grows nostalgic of it.
Rodriguez was an avid reader when he was young.

He could often be found reading in a secluded part of his home. His childhood classroom had numerous posters espousing the virtues of reading and learning. He wondered what the connection between the two was, whether or not reading was the only way to learn. For him reading was simply a means to cross titles off of a list; a list of “important” books put together by some profesor. One anecdote that encapsulates his adolescent mindset is when he read Plato's Republic. He describes how, at numerous times, he found himself lost but kept pushing through the book just so he could say he read it. Having finished the book he felt an immense pride; pride at being able to say he read it, not pride at having truly read and understood the text. As an adult he is able to understand his folly, but as a child he didn't understand that, much like the distinction between hearing and listening, there is a difference between reading and understanding. As a graduate student Rodriguez has shown himself to have a deeper purpose for reading. Whereas previously he read for his pride in saying that he read, now he shares how he read to be introspective. He searched through books of educational literature to find some theoretical model of a student that he identified with. He finds no text to identify with save for a chapter in Hoggart's Uses of Literature. Hoggart describes an imagined student called a “scholarship boy” who is the ideal student from

a working class background. The scholarship boy lives between the worlds of school and home and gradually comes to oppose the values of home to embrace the values of school. Rodriguez immediately identifies with the model of the scholarship boy and relate passages from Hoggart’s text to his own life experience. This process of relating the scholarship boy to his own life helps him come to terms with the loss he personally experienced. He finds a way to frame the loss that he experienced because of his education through further education..
When Rodriguez says that his education gave him ways of speaking and caring about the cultural separation from his parents he means he is able to nail down the abstract longing and nostalgia he eventually had for his old life. He describes one of the major themes of elitist literature as reverence for simpler life, the kind of life his parents lived, and one he would have lived had he not pursued education. He learned this when he was a scholarship boy, unable to truly process what it meant, remembering it only to parrot it back to a teacher. After more years of schooling, and the personal development to think for himself, he comes to achieve a desire of his parents life that comes without the anxiety and guilt of having pursued a different life. Paradoxically, it is more education that allows Rodriguez to appraise the price of his education and to appreciate the fact that his education did come with a price.