In “The Achievement of Desire,” author Richard Rodriguez warns that “he has used education to remake himself”, but in doing so isolated himself from his past, and those he cared about.
Rodriguez wrote this essay in the context of how we teach (are we just memorizing without understanding ), and that with age he’s able to see the importance and pitfalls of education. He wants to warn his audience those much like his younger self first and second generation immigrants, but also those well educated or in college who are still making the same mistakes he once did. Rodriguez’s purpose is to persuade the audience that education is not a ladder to forever climb, that education is not just memorizing facts, but about bettering ourselves and learning to think critically, or we may end up like a “scholarship boy” …show more content…
Rodriguez uses loss and regret to show the moments he missed out on like “My mother laughed girlishly one night, trying not to pronounce sheep as ship. From a distance I listened sullenly.” He goes on to use irony to hammer in these points in that his final educational achievement was the end of education, and he ends this with a blend of sympathy in that it took him so long to figure out, but it doesn’t have to be so for others. Rodriguez uses a multitude of tools to help illustrate his purpose. Some of his tools are that of “imagery”, “personal experience”, and “conceded points”. He uses personal experience as the backbone of his story, and concedes that while education did distance him from his family it also helped broaden his horizons later on. His best tool though is that of imagery “After dinner I would rush to a bedroom with papers and books. I resisted parental pleas to “save lights” by coming to the kitchen to work. I kept so much, so often, to myself.” The thesis of the essay is stated as “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