The Achievement of Desire by Richard Rodriguez bemoans the difficulties, challenges, disappointments, and mostly, the isolation that comes via the education process. Like Tom Wolfe, the author believes during the process of becoming a “scholar” that, you can never go home again. He believes this is especially true for a working-class family child because that child, in order to become educated, has to “remake” himself from his family of origin development “A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student” (Rodriguez 3). However, as we shall see, Rodriguez comes to believe that such a level of education as he has developed is the only bridge back home for a “scholarship boy.”
In this way, the author redefines the term “working-class” from its traditional socio-economic definition. Instead, working-class becomes a word that means a condition of disadvantage from which an educated person must distance themselves, in fact become someone else, in order to escape. In the beginning of his academic career and development, Rodriguez was embarrassed by what he perceived as his parents’ lack of education while he was also ashamed of those feelings. Once he began to do well in school, learn another language than his native Spanish (English), and began to discover all the wonders and secrets education bestows, his parents seemed coarse, embarrassing, and most of all-different than his educators. Like most individuals who begin to develop a quality education at a young age, Rodriguez was only seeing his perspective on the situation and greatly underestimating his parents’ contributions to his life while at the same time frowning upon their shortcomings. In hindsight, Rodriguez admits that this process is even more natural for the working-class scholar because their parents are usually lac...