Blog 3: The Achievement of Desire

     The main concern for Richard Rodriguez in writing the essay "The Achievement of Desire" is undoubtedly  the notion that education has managed to pull him away from his family because his family was culturally separated from the knowledge he became so passionate for in his schooling throughout his youth. As a "scholarship boy," Rodriguez was always overly anxious about his schoolwork (516). He became so engulfed by his books that he started to draw himself apart from his family and outside activities. The successes Rodriguez acquired in the classroom as a young boy went hand and hand with the loss of a true, intimate relationship with that of the home. In the essay, the idea that school emphasizes the values of reflectiveness and rational thinking while the home teaches one to "trust spontaneity and nonrational ways of thinking" is presented by Rodriguez to draw the conclusion that "good schooling requires that any student alter early childhood habits" (517). This is where I, the reader, disagree the writer...to a certain extent. I find that, with the age Rodriguez reflects back on is his essay (elementary school), the average child in this age group does not fall under the tag of "rational" or "reflective" as did Rodriguez in those years. This idea makes Rodriguez argument too narrow to be applied universally to the majority of all children going through the schooling process today. In opposition to the writer's beliefs, I find that schooling is a place where children take part in nonrational thinking and the home is a place of self-reflectional and rationality. At school -especially elementary school- children are nearly mimicking  and memorizing what the teacher tells them in order to do well on the quiz or test for that material. The child, or student in this case, retrieves information taught by the teacher but may not fully understand what he has retrieved; moreover, by copying the techniques and actions of the teacher he is able to get away with this because he only needs to know how to pass the test and not fully comprehend the knowledge being taught to him. The student does this because getting good grades is what drives him to do well in school and the person that best understands the achievement of good grades is the teacher so he follows him/her.  In the home children are left to their own interpretation of the surroundings because there is no system that grades them based on their interpretation so the thoughts they possess on an idea are completely left to their own discrimination with minimal intervention from the parents. What a child decides to physically do at the house is something he must decide rationally on his own because there is no system forcing or pushing him to do something he may not fully comprehend. Children are not forced to imitate their parents' actions, they choose to do so; however, they are forced to try to do well on a quiz or test because they must suffer the consequences of a bad grade if they don't. This becomes an issue of prioritizing: how important are we making elementary school education (and therefore all levels of education) today? Students are pressured to fall into the trap of the "scholarship boy." WIth thousands of college applications being sent in to one university the option of getting an "A" in a class becomes mandatory even at the expense of the family. One could acquire all the knowledge in the world but if he shuts out those who love them what does he gain?