Student Placement in The Loss of the Creature and The Achievment of Desire

Students are to sit passively, and take in information that is presented by the experts who are teachers. Students are novices and apprentices who are inferior to teacher. This placement in the classroom says a lot of how students are placed in the world. Teachers have the power to instill their views unto students. This causes students to adapt to the teachers’ views and see the world the way the teachers are presenting to them. With this way of education, it implies the relation to the world, students are not expected to explore and are robbed to have their own experiences or interpretations. Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” and Richard Rodriguez’s “The Achievement of Desire” both demonstrate clear views on what it is like for students in the environment where they are placed in and handed information that is expected to be learned, and accepted. The thinking is to have students conform to be successful. Being a student for fourteen years, the education system, the roles of teacher and students have resulted in an inauthentic educational experience as Percy suggests and produced a scholarship boy type of student as Rodriguez explains.

Starting off, I see the specific and separate roles of teachers and students. Through the years there are different teachers, different faces, different names but they are pretty much the same. They expect to teach the students as much information to meet certain criteria they need to meet. Teachers don’t always foster students learning by trying to engage students in different ways, but instead stick to the generic way of teaching, where the students sit and the teachers teach. Percy describes the role of students and teachers. Students are viewed as the consumers and teachers are presen...

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...the way students learn by not being the “scholarship boy” or a change in the way teachers teach by allowing students to learn to be sovereign in their learning and allowing them to have authentic experiences. Change can happen.

Works Cited

Desmond, John F. "The Confessions Of Walker Percy." Logos: A Journal Of Catholic

Thought & Culture 16.1 (2013): 126-150. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Nov. 2013.

Percy, Walker. "The Loss of the Creature." Ways of Reading An Anthology for Writers. 9th ed.

Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 459-71. Print.

Rodriguez, Richard. "Going Home Again: The New American Scholarship Boy." American

Scholar 44.1 (1974): 15. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Nov. 2013.

Rodriguez, Richard. "The Achievements of Desire." Ways of Reading An Anthology for Writers.

9th ed. Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2011. 513-32. Print.