Summary Of The Achievement Of Desire By Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez in his nonfictional work, “The Achievement of Desire” (1982), posits that his life typifies a problematic cultural discontinuity concerning the education and family life of certain students, which generates issues such as a disconnection concerning true knowledge and superficial academic achievement in the minds of these students termed ‘scholarship boys.’ The 1993 movie Six Degrees of Separation tells the story of Paul, a Harvard graduate student who achieves the good-graces of art dealing couple Ouisa and Flan Kittredge, revealed New York underbelly-residing impersonator glib. Rodriguez develops his thesis by examining his own experience, first examining his scholarly ambition, then the changing relationship between him

The student originally described as a ‘Scholarship Boy’ by Richard Hoggart only briefly in his 1957 work The Uses of Literacy “tends to over-stress the importance of examinations, of the piling-up of knowledge and of received opinions. He discovers a technique of apparent learning, of the acquiring of facts rather than of the handling and use of facts.” Rodriguez develops further this definition, in his prolific summation he writes that “he is the great mimic; a collector of thoughts, not a thinker.” Rodriguez emphasizes that this troubled mimicry-dependent student is despite the popular pedagogical perception is a small minority, noting that, “Radical educationalists meanwhile complain that ghetto schools “oppress” students by trying to mold them, stifling native characteristics. The truer critique would be just the reverse: not that schools change ghetto students too much, but that while they might promote the occasional scholarship student, they change most students barely at all.” This point is of particular note as it points to an unexpected rhetorical value system, deeming what we had previously regarded as his tribulation ‘promotion,’ and complaining

Rodriguez remarks on his realization about his lost culture “hidden beneath layers of embarrassment.” Caroline Calvillo in “Memoir and autobiography” writes that he “addresses the personal cost of loneliness and alienation from family brought about, he says, by his educational ambition and loftiness, and […] his taste for "upper-class" intellectual interactions and academic cultural situations,” quite cynically (53). His realization that “schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student.” The cultural assimilation present in both works is commonly thought to be change in class. What ‘class’ is exactly is an especially difficult topic which demands the implementation of several especially large words, which in-turn require the aid of several especially wordy academic journal articles to understand. It is thus on the basis of expediency that the lower class status of both Rodriguez and Paul, and the upper class status of a certain selection their compatriots, will be accepted on a basis of fiat. It is an especially important task of academics to remind those of the lower class that they are indeed of this lower class, as otherwise these classifications might become eroded thus invalidating the numerous painstakingly written academic works on the subject, which would be a great shame.