Richard Rodriguez Reading

The reading is an excerpt from Richard Rodriguez book and he starts talking about his education. When people would ask him how he was able to get so far in life, Richard would say it was because of the school he went to and the support he had at his house. But at home Richard would have trouble getting help from his parents because of the language barrier. When he would just focus on reading everyone would make jokes about how he doesn’t play outside. Richard says that the reason he was so successful in school was because he couldn’t forget how school was separating him from the life he use to love. Leaving the life that he enjoyed for a successful education was “the loss” for Richard.

Richard goes on to reference Hoggart’s writing and how similar it was to his own life. In Hoggart’s writing there’s an explanation to how the school and home life are culturally opposites. For the child to understand the school culture they have to be more alone and let go of some of the family’s ethos, and the students who do this are called “scholarship boys.” It would be easier for a child doing this at a young age but when the child is a “working class child” it would be difficult because the classroom would make the child discourage their parents. To the working-class children everything their parents do will be perceived differently than how the scholarship boys see their parents. Scholarship children will feel embarrassed about their parents and try to make a teacher a father figure.

In the reading, Richard Rodriguez understands that he’s a scholarship boy and talks about how he didn’t like how his relationship with his family was disappearing because of his education. He started to get embarrassed by the lack of education that his parents had and never noticed their “enormous native intelligence.” He felt that everything he was reading was only for the ability to say that he’s read that book. Rodriguez says that the scholarship boy only looks at life as “unromantic and plain” and all his ideas are “clearly borrowed.” He says that the scholarship student is a bad student, a mimic, and that they only reach nostalgia at the end of their schooling.