Blog 3, "The Achievement of Desire"

" The Achievement of Desire", by Richard Rodriguez, is a story about how the author started off as the uneducated student to becoming a "scholarship boy." This "scholarship boy" is someone he described as wanting to gain knowledge, and as someone who’s greatest desire is to achieve an elitist education.
                             
In this sort of pursuit, to gain knowledge, he says the person becomes an imitator; the person is actually becoming a bad student because he forgets about himself, he forgets how to be genuine about a topic; instead, he focuses on writing and speaking about facts he has acquired about the topic; he does not use the facts to support his opinion, but he uses them to almost always inform as if he was writing an academic essay. This leaves the student empty in heart, and yet full in the mind.

When the student becomes empty, the student forgets himself; he no longer knows how to be himself. He becomes distant. The author wrote that he had trouble relating to his parents because he was transforming into this person. Essentially, the author is not able to relate to his parents because his goals were different than theirs. Of course, they wanted him to succeed, but they never experienced what he was, so they could not relate to what he was going through--they could not help him in some ways, even in academia--he surpassed their expertise.

Also, he became this person by forgetting and losing most of his culture, and his family. His goal was to learn as much as he could about what he was told was important; things told to him from people teaching him how to become educated (the nuns, teachers, professors, etc...). At the expense of not knowing, and/or learning, and/or maintaining what was valued by his parents and his family, he optimizes what he can learn, he reads constantly; he forgets and loses a lot of his past.

He knows that he is changing and becoming a different person. The elitist student, the "scholarship boy" knows/learns he has to make this sacrifice early on. This is why he and his parents have a hard time accepting each other. It seemed that he was making a choice between his family and his education, and his family members were losing, and that was the main problem; education was what his parents wanted him to focus on primarily, they were proud, but the problem was in the way he went about gaining his education. His parents did not understand. Why did he have to leave home for college? Why was reading such a passion of his? He isolated himself from them because it is something he says every individual must experience to some degree; it is the only way one can morph into his own self. The struggle is: how does one maintain proper education and loved ones while in a similar situation?