Fluent Essays

The Achievement of Desire: Personal Reflections on Learning Basics Author(s): Richard Rodriguez Source: College English, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Nov., 1978), pp. 239-254 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/375783 Accessed: 10-06-2020 20:57 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected] Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms National Council of Teachers of English is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to College English This content downloaded from 192.92.124.15 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:57:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms College Vol. 40, No. 3 * NOVEMBER 1978 English RICHARD RODRIGUEZ The Achievement of Desire: Personal Reflections on Learning Basics NOT LONG AGO in a ghetto classroom, I attempted to lecture on the mystery of the sounds of our words to a roomful of diffident students. ( Sumer is i-cumen in. ... The music of our words. We need Aretha Franklins voice to fill plain words with music-her life. Dont you hear it? Songs on the car radio. Listen!) In the face of their empty stares, I tried to create an enthusiasm. But the girls in the back row turned to watch some boy passing outside. There were flutters of smiles, blushes of acne. Waves. And someones mouth elongated heavy, silent words through the bar- rier of glass. Silent words-the lips.straining to shape each voiceless syllable: Meet meee late errr. By the door, the instructor kept smiling at me, apparently hopeful that I would be able to spark an enthusiasm in the class. But only one student seemed to be listening. A girl around fourteen. In that grey room her eyes glittered with ambition. She kept nodding.and nodding at all that I said; she even took notes. And each time I asked the class a question, she jerked up and down in her desk, like a marionette, while her hand waved over the bowed heads of her classmates. It was myself (as a boy) I saw as she faced me (now a man early in my thirties). I first entered a classroom unprepared and barely able to speak English. Twenty- one years later, I concluded my studies in the stately quiet of the reading room of the British Museum. Richard Rodriguez was educated in Catholic primary and secondary schools in Sacramento, California, before moving on to Stanford. He studied as a graduate student at Columbia, the Warburg Institute in London, and the University of California at Berkeley. He is now writing a book of essays on the meaning of education to be titled Toward Words and to be published next year by Knopf. The Achievement of Desire is a version of a part of a chapter of this book. 239 This content downloaded from 192.92.124.15 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:57:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 240 COLLEGE ENGLISH Thus with two sentences, I can outline my dramatic academic career. It will be harder to summarize what sort of life connects both of these sentences. For though I was a very good student, I was also a very bad student. I was a scholarship boy,1 a certain kind of scholarship student. Always successful. Always unconfident. Exhilerated by my progress. Yet sad. Anxious and eager to learn-the prized stu- dent. Too ambitious, too eager-an imitative and unoriginal pupil. Certain factors important for my success are easy enough to mention. In the first place, my older brother and sister were very good students; they influenced me. (They brought home the bright, shiny trophies I came to want.) And, I attended an excellent grammar school. (Due to a simple geographical accident, our house in Sacramento neighbored one of the wealthiest sections of town; I went to a school, as a result, where I was the only problem student in class.) And, my mother and father always encouraged me. (At every graduation, they were behind the stunning flash of the camera when I turned to look at the crowd.) As important as these factors were, however, they inadequately account for my advance. Nor do they suggest what an odd success I managed. Only moderately intelligent, I was highly ambitious, eager, desperate for the goal of becoming edu- cated. My brother and two sisters enjoyed the advantages I had and were success- ful students, but none of them ever seemed so anxious about their schooling. I alone came home, when a new student, for example, and insisted on correcting the sim- ple grammar and pronunciation mistakes of our parents. (Two negatives make a positive!) Regularly, I would ask my parents for help with my homework in order to be able to pull the book out of their hands, when they were unable to help me, and say, Ill try to figure it out some more by myself. Constantly, I quoted the opinions of teachers and trumpeted new facts I had learned. Proudly, I announced in my familys surprised silence-that a teacher had said I was losing all trace of my (Spanish) accent. After a few months, I outgrew such behavior, its true. I became more tactful. Less obvious about my ambitions. But with always-increasing intensity, I devoted myself to my studies. There never seemed enough time in a day to learn-to memorize-all that I wanted to know. I became bookish, a joke to my brothers, and puzzling to my parents. (You wont find it in your books, my brother would sneer when he often saw me reading; my father opened a closet one day and found me inside with my books.) Such ambitions set me apart, the only member of the family who deserved the pejorative label of scholarship boy. What I am about to describe to you has taken me twenty years to admit: The primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldnt forget that schooling was changing me, and separating me from the life I had enjoyed before becoming a student. (That simple realization!) For years I never spoke to anyone about this boyhood fear, my guilt and remorse. I never mentioned these feelings to my parents or my brothers. Not to my teachers or classmates. From a very early age, I understood enough, just enough, about my experiences to keep what I knew vague, repressed, private, be- neath layers of embarrassment. Not until the last months that I was a graduate student, nearly thirty years old, was it possible for me to think about the reasons for For reasons of tone and verbal economy only, I employ the expression, scholarship boy, throughout this essay. I do not intend to imply by its usage that the experiences I describe belong to or are the concern solely of male students. This content downloaded from 192.92.124.15 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:57:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Achievement of Desire: Personal Reflections on Learning Basics 241 my success. Only then. At the end of my schooling, I needed to determine how far I had moved from my past. The adult finally confronted-and now must publicly say-what the child shuddered from knowing and could never admit to the faces which smiled at his every success. I At the end, in the British Museum (too distracted to finish my dissertation), for weeks I read, speed-read, books by sociologists and educationists only to find in- frequent and brief mention of scholarship students, successful working-class stu- dents. Then one day I came across Richard Hoggarts The Uses of Literacy and saw, in his description of the scholarship boy, myself. For the first time I realized that there were others much like me, and I was able to frame the meaning of my academic failure and success. What Hoggart understands is that the scholarship boy moves between environ- ments, his home and the classroom, which are at cultural extremes, opposed. With his family, the boy has the pleasure of an exuberant intimacy-the familys consola- tion in feeling public alienation. Lavish emotions texture home life. Then at school the instruction is to use reason primarily. Immediate needs govern the pace of his parents lives; from his mother and father he learns to trust spontaneity and non- rational ways of knowing. Then at school there is mental calm; teachers emphasize the value of a reflectiveness which opens a space between thinking and immediate action. It will require years of schooling for the boy to sketch the cultural differences as abstractly as this. But he senses those differences early. Perhaps as early as the night he brings home some assignment from school and finds the house too noisy for study. He has to be more and more alone, if he is going to get on. He will have, probably unconsciously, to oppose the ethos of the hearth, the intense gregariousness of the working-class family group. Since everything centres upon the living-room, there is un- likely to be a room of his own; the bedrooms are cold and inhospitable, and to warm them or the front room, if there is one, would not only be expensive, but would require an imaginative leap-out of the tradition-which most families are not capable of mak- ing. There is a corner of the living-room table. On the other side Mother is ironing, the wireless is on, someone is singing a snatch of song or Father says intermittently whatever comes into his head. The boy has to cut himself off mentally so as to do his homework as well as he can.2 The next day, the lesson is as apparent at school. There are even rows of desks. The boy must raise his hand (and rehearse his thoughts) before speaking in a loud voice to an audience of students he barely knows. And there is time enough and silence to think about ideas (big ideas) never mentioned at home. Not for the working-class child alone is adjustment to the classroom difficult. Schooling requires of any student alteration of childhood habits. But the working- class child is usually least prepared for the change. Unlike most middle-class chil- dren, moreover, he goes home and sees in his parents a way of life that is not only different, but starkly opposed to that of the classroom. They talk and act in pre- cisely the ways his teachers discourage. Without his extraordinary determination 2Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), p. 241. This content downloaded from 192.92.124.15 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:57:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 242 COLLEGE ENGLISH and the great assistance of others-at home and at school-there is little chance for success. Typically, most working-class children are barely changed by the class- room. The exception succeeds. Only a few become scholarship students. Of these, Richard Hoggart estimates, most manage a fairly graceful transition. They somehow learn to live in the two very different worlds of their day. There are some others, however, those Hoggart terms scholarship boys, for whom success comes with awkwardness and guilt. Scholarship boy: good student, troubled son. The child is moderately endowed, intellectually mediocre, HIoggart suggests-though it may be more pertinent to note the special qualities of termperament in the boy. Here is a child haunted by the knowledge that one chooses to become a student. (It is not an inevitable or natural step in growing up.) And that, with the decision, he will separate himself from a life that he loves and even from his own memory of himself. For a time, he wavers, balances allegiance. The boy is himself (until he reaches, say, the upper forms) very much of both the worlds of home and school. He is enormously obedient to the dictates of the world of school, but emotionally still strongly wants to continue as part of the family circle (p. 241). Gradually, because he needs to spend more time studying, his balance is lost. He must enclose himself in the silence permitted and required by intense concentration. Thus, he takes the first step toward academic success. But a guilt sparks, flickers, then flares up within him. He cannot help feeling that he is rejecting the attractions of family life. (There is no logic here, only the great logic of the heart.) From the very first days, through the years following, it will be with his parents-the figures of lost authority, the persons toward whom he still feels intense emotion-that the change will most powerfully be measured. A separation will un- ravel between him and them. Not the separation, the generation gap, caused by a difference of age, but one that results from cultural factors. The former is capable of being shortened with time, when the child, grown older, comes to repeat the refrain of the newly adult: I realize now what my parents knew. ... Age figures in the separation of the scholarship boy from his parents, but in an odder way. Advancing in his studies, the boy notices that his father and mother have not changed as much as he. Rather, as he sees them, they often remind him of the person he was once, and the life he earlier shared with them. In a way he realizes what Romantics also know when they praise the working-class for the capacity for human closeness, qual- ities of passion and spontaneity, that the rest of us share in like measure only in the earliest part of our youth. For Romantics, this doesnt make working-class life chil- dish. Rather, it becomes challenging just because it is an adult way of life. The scholarship boy reaches a different conclusion. He cannot afford to admire his parents. (How could he and still pursue such a contrary life?) He permits himself embarrassment at their lack of education. And to evade nostalgia for the life he has lost, he concentrates on the benefits education will give him. He becomes an espe- cially ambitious student. [The scholarship boy] tends to make a father-figure of his form master (p. 243), Hoggart writes with the calm prose of the social scientist. His remark only makes me remember with what urgency I idolized my teachers. I began imitating their accents, using their diction, trusting their every direction. Any book they told me to read, I read-and then waited for them to tell me which books I enjoyed. I was awed by how much they knew. I copied their most casual This content downloaded from 192.92.124.15 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:57:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Achievement of Desire: Personal Reflections on Learning Basics 243 opinions; I memorized all that they taught. I stayed after school and showed up on Saturdays in order to help-to get their attention. It was always their encourage- ment that mattered to me. They understood exactly what my achievements entailed. My memory clutched and caressed each word of praise they bestowed so that, still today, their compliments come quickly to mind. I cannot forget either, though it is tempting to want to forget, some of the scenes at home which followed my resolution to seek academic success. During the crucial first months, the shy, docile, obedient student came home a shrill and precocious son-as though he needed to prove (to himself? to his parents?) that he had made the right choice. After a while, I developed quiet tact. I grew more calm. I became a conventionally dutiful son; politely affectionate; cheerful enough; even-for reasons beyond choosing-my fathers favorite. And in many ways, much about my home life was easy, calm, comfortable, happy in the rhythm of the familys routine: the noises of radios and alarm clocks, the errands, the rituals of dinner and going to bed in flannel pyjamas. But withheld from my parents was most of what deeply mattered to me; the extraordinary experience of my education. My father or mother would wonder: What did you learn today? Or say: Tell us about your new courses. I would barely respond. Just the usual things. . . . (Silence. Silence!) In place of the sounds of intimacy which once flowed easily between us, there was the silence. (The toll of my guilt and my loss.) After dinner, I would rush away to a bedroom with papers and books. As often as possible I resisted parental pleas to save lights by coming to the kitchen to work. I kept so much, so often to myself. Sad. Guilty for the excitement of coming upon new ideas, new possibilities. Eager. Fascinated. I hoarded the pleasures of learning. Alone for hours. Enthralled. Afraid. Quiet (the house noisy), I rarely looked away from my books-or back on my memories. Times when relatives visited and the front rooms were warmed by Spanish sounds, I slipped out of the house. It mattered that education was changing me. It never ceased to matter. I would not have become a scholarship boy had it not mattered so much. Walking to school with classmates sometimes, I would hear them tell me that their parents read to them at night. Strange-sounding books like Winnie the Pooh. Immediately, I asked them: What is it like? But the question only confused my companions. So I learned to keep it to myself, and silently imagined the scene of parent and child reading together. One day-I must have been nine or ten years old at the time-my mother asked for a nice book to read. (Something not too hard that you think I might like.) Carefully, I chose one. I think it was Willa Cathers My Antonia. But when, several weeks later, I happened to see it next to her bed, unread except for the first few pages, I was furious with impatience. And then suddenly I wanted to cry. I grabbed up the book and took it back to my room. Why didnt you tell us about the award? my mother scolded-though her face was softened with pride. At the grammar school ceremony, some days later, I felt such contrary feelings. (There is no simple roadmap through the heart of the schol- arship boy.) Nervously, I heard my father speak to my teacher and felt my familiar shame of his accent. Then guilty for the shame. MIy instructor was so soft-spoken This content downloaded from 192.92.124.15 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:57:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 244 COLLEGE ENGLISH and her words were edged clear. I admired her until it seemed to me that she spoke too carefully. Sensing that she was condescending to them, I was suddenly resent- ful. Protective. I tried to move my parents away. You must both be so proud of him, she said. They quickly answered in the affirmative. They were proud. We are proud of all our children. Then, this afterthought: They sure didnt get their brains from us. I smiled. The three of them laughed. But tightening the irony into a knot was the knowledge that my parents were always behind me. In many ways, they made academic success possible. They evened the path. They sent their children to parochial schools because the nuns teach better. They paid a tuition they couldnt afford. They spoke English at home. (/Hablanos en English!) Their voices united to urge me past my initial resist- ance to the classroom. They always wanted for my brothers and me the chances they never had. It saddened my mother to learn about Mexican-American parents who wanted their children to start working after finishing high school. In schooling she recog- nized the key to job advancement. And she remembered her past. As a girl, new to America, she had been awarded a diploma by high school teachers too busy or careless to notice that she hardly spoke English. On her own she determined to learn how to type. That skill got her clean office jobs and encouraged an optimism about the possibility of advancement. (Each morning when her sisters put on uniforms for work, she chose a bright-colored dress.) She became an excellent speller-of words she mispronounced. (And Ive never been to college, she would say smiling when her children asked about a word they didnt wvant to look up in a dictionary.) When her youngest child started going to high school, my mother found full-time employment. She worked for the (California) state government, in civil service posi- tions, positions carefully numbered and acquired by examinations. The old ambi- tion of her youth was still bright then. She consulted bulletin boards for news of new jobs, possible advancement. Then one day saw mention of something called an anti-poverty agency. A typing job. A glamorous job-part of the governors staff. (A knowledge of Spanish desired.) She applied without hesitation and grew nerv- ous only when the job was suddenly hers. Everyone comes to work all dressed up, she reported at night. And didnt need to say more than that her co-workers wouldnt let her answer the phone. She was only a typist. Though a fast typist. And an excellent speller. There was a letter one day to be sent to a Washington cabinet officer. On the dictating tape my mother heard mention of urban guerillas. She typed (the wrong word, correctly): goril- las. Everyone was shocked. The mistake horrified the anti-poverty bureaucrats who, several days later, returned her to her previous position. She would go no further. She willed her ambition to her children. After one of her daughters got a job ironing for some rich people we knew, my mother was nervous with fear. (I dont want you wearing a uniform.) Another summer, when I came home from college, she refused to let me work as a gardener. You can do much better than that, she insisted. Youve got too much education now. I complied with her wish, though I really didnt think of schooling as job- training. Its true that I planned by that time to become a teacher, but it wasnt an occupation I aimed for as much as something more elusive and indefinite: I wanted This content downloaded from 192.92.124.15 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:57:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The Achievement of Desire: Personal Reflections on Learning Basics 245 to know as much as my teachers; to possess their confidence and authority; even to assume a professors persona. For my father, education had a value different from that it had for my mother. He chuckled when I claimed to be tired by reading and writing. It wasnt real work I did, he would say. Youll never know what real work is. His comment would recall in my mind his youth. Orphaned when he was eight, he began working after two years in school. He came to America in his twenties, dreaming of returning to school and becoming an engineer. (Work for my hands and my head.) But there was no money and too little energy at the end of a day for more than occasional night-school courses in English and arithmetic. Days were spent in factories. He no longer expected ever to become an engineer. And he grew pessimistic about the ultimate meaning of work or the possibility of ever escaping its claims. (But look at all youve accomplished, his best friend once said to him. My father said nothing, and only smiled weakly.) But I would see him looking at me with opened-mouth curiosity sometimes when I glanced up from my books. Other times, I would come upon him in my bedroom, standing at my desk or bookshelves, fingering the covers of books, opening them to read a few lines. He seemed aware at such moments of some remarkable possibility implied by academic activity. (Its leisure? Its splendid uselessness?) At the moment our eyes met, we each looked quickly away and never spoke. Such memories as these slammed together in the instant of hearing that familiar refrain (all scholarship boys hear) from strangers and friends: Your parents must be so proud. Yes, my parents were happy at my success. They also were proud. The night of the awards ceremony my mothers eyes were brighter than the trophy I won. Pushing back the hair from my forehead, she whispered that I had shown the gringos. Years later, my father would wonder why I never displayed my awards and diplomas. He said that he liked to go to doctors offices and notice the schools they had attended. My awards got left in closets. The golden figure atop a trophy was broken, wingless, after hitting the ground. Medals were put into a jar. My father found my high school diploma when it was about to be thrown out with the trash. He kept it afterwards with his own things. We are proud of all of our children. With more than mere pride, however, my parents regarded my progress. They endured my early precocious behavior-but with what private anger and humilia- tion? As their children grew older and would come home to challenge ideas both of them held, they argued with a son or daughter before submitting to the force of logic or superior evidence with the disclaimer: Its what we were taught in our time to believe. These discussions ended abruptly, but my parents remembered them at other times when (smiling, unsmiling) they said that education was going to our heads. More importantly, both of them noticed how changed the family had be- come. My father himself retired into quiet, speaking to his children in paragraphs of single words or short phrases. My mother-the woman who joked that she w^ould die if she ever stopped talking-softly wondered: Why cant we be more of a fam- ily? More in the Mexican style? She asked the question of all her children. But the last one surely from whom she would have expected an answer was her youngest This content downloaded from 192.92.124.15 on Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:57:52 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 246 COLLEGE ENGLISH son, the child who was so quiet at home, but had so much to say to high school instructors and his best friends mother-a college professor. When the time came for me to go to college, I was the first in the family who asked to leave home. My departure only made physically apparent the separation that had occurred long before. But it was too stark a reminder. In the months pre- ceeding my departure, I heard the question my mother never asked except indi- rectly. In the hot kitchen, tired at the end of her workday, she demanded to know, Why arent the schools here in Sacramento good enough for you? They were for your brothers. In the middle of a long car ride, never turning to look at me, she wondered, Why do you need to go so far away? Late at night, ironing, she said with disgust, Why do you have to put us through this big expense? You know your scholarship will never cover it all. But when September came, there was a rush to get everything ready. In a bedroom, that last night, 1 packed the big brown valise. My mother sat nearby sewing initials onto the clothes I would take. And she said no more about my leaving. Nothing. Months later, two weeks of Christmas vacation: the first hours home were the hardest. My parents and I sat in the kitchen and self-consciously had a conversation. (But lacking the same words to develop our sentences and to shape our interests, what was there to say? What could I tell them about the term paper I had just finished on the universality of Shakespeares appeal?) I mentioned only small, obvious things: my dormitory life, weekend trips I had taken, random and ordinary events. They responded with news of their own. (One was almost grateful for a family crisis about which there was much to say.) We tried, finally we failed, to make the conversation seem like more than an interview. II From an early age, I knew that my father and mother could read and write both English and Spanish. I had seen my father make his way through what, now I suppose, must have been income tax forms. On other occasions I waited apprehen- sively while my mother learned of a relatives illness or death from letters airmailed from Mexico. For both of my parents, however, reading was something done out of necessity and as quickly as possible. Never did I see either of them read an entire book. Nor did I see them read for pleasure. Reading materials around our house were those of a nonliterate household: work manuals, prayer books, newspapers, and recipes. As Hoggart explains: . A. .At home [the scholarship boy] sees strewn around and reads regularly himself, magaz.ines which are never mentioned at school, which seem not to belong to the world to which the school introduces him; at school he hears about and reads books never mentioned at home. When he 1)rings those books into the house, they do not take their place with other books which the family are reading, for often there are none or almost none; his books look, rather, like strange tools. (p. 242). Each school year would start with my mothers instruction: Dont write in your books so ve can … 2021/10/11 下午11:20 Summary Writing: Fal21 ENGL 001A #70862 READING AND COMPOSITION-Online https://canvas.pasadena.edu/courses/1117051/pages/summary-writing?module_item_id=13630150 1/1 Summary Writing Your first writing assignment, worth 35 points, is to write a summary of Richard Rodriguez The Achievement of Desire, or John Gattos Against School. Here is a power point covering the basics of summary. Enjoy! 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