Education In Richard Rodriguez's The Achievement Of Desire

Richard Rodriguez in “The Achievement Of Desire”, is a man who started to reflect on his early adolescence at the age of thirty. The author struggled to maintain a balance between a successful education and the life of coming from a working class family. At a very young age Rodriguez had decided to make education his one and only top priority, not noticing it would affect him gradually. He would rather spend his time with his books and learning than having quality time with his family and friends, however he became aware about the separation occurring between himself and his family, explaining throughout the text how he was not able to have conversations with his own family and becoming an outsider to his education and home. However, fails

For example, Rodriguez reveals that all this time he was not learning he was resembling his teachers actions in order to learn. He was not accomplishing knowledge or anything at all. He was only memorizing on how to be the teachers rather than himself. He had no self identity of his own how could he if he enjoyed the fact he got to use the behaviors of his teachers and apply them to himself. To him being like his teachers was a great victory that he had won because he look up to them so much that he idolized them. He would even stay after school “ to get help”, from the teachers, but in reality he only wanted their full undivided attention “I began by intimidating their accents, using their diction, trusting their every direction. The very first facts they dispensed, I grasped with awe. Any book they told me to read , I read- then waited for them to tell me which books I enjoyed. Their every causal opinion I came to adopt and to trumpet when I returned home” (Rodriguez 198). Knowledge is being accessed by mocking the teacher 's identity in order to grasp their knowledge. Rodriguez then uses it as his own way of learning, but he is only reflecting the teacher knowledge and not his. He believes the teachers are the only ones who are able to give him an education and better him. However he lacks knowledge because he is only obtaining his teacher’s level of knowledge he is not going beyond and seeing what in reality he is capable of