Miner, Rodriguez, and Tan all deal with issues of language and acceptance in the community. What do they say and how does this relate to your own experience. Miner: https://msu.edu/~jdowell/miner.ht

1“The Achievement of Desire”Richard RodriguezI stand in the ghetto classroom—”the guest speaker”—attempting to lecture on the mystery of the sounds ofour words to rows of diffident students. “Don’t you hear it? Listen! The music of our words. ‘Sumer is icumen in. . ..’ And songs on the car radio. We need Aretha Franklin’s voice to fill plain words with music—her life.” In the faceof their empty stares, I try to create an enthusiasm. But the girls in the back row turn to watch some boy passingoutside. There are flutters of smiles, waves. And someone’s mouth elongates heavy, silent words through the barrierof glass. Silent words—the lips straining to shape each voiceless syllable: “Meet meee late errr.” By the door, theinstructor smiles at me, apparently hoping that I will be able to spark some enthusiasm in the class. But only onestudent seems to be listening. A girl, maybe fourteen. In this gray room her eyes shine with ambition. She keepsnodding and nodding at all that I say; she even takes notes. And each time I ask a question, she jerks up and down inher desk like a marionette, while her hand waves over the bowed heads of her classmates. It is myself (as a boy) Isee as she faces me now (a man in my thirties).The boy who first entered a classroom barely able to speak English, twenty years later concluded his studiesin the stately quiet of the reading room in the British Museum. Thus with one sentence I can summarize myacademic career. It will be harder to summarize what sort of life connects the boy to the man.With every award, each graduation from one level of education to the next, people I’d meet wouldcongratulate me. Their refrain was always the same: “Your parents must be very proud.” Sometimes then they’d askme how I managed it—my “success.” (How?) After a while, I had several quick answers to give in reply. I’d admit,for one thing, that I went to an excellent grammar school. (My earliest teachers, the nuns, made my success theirambition.) And my brother and both my sisters were very good students. (They often brought home the shiny schooltrophies I came to want.) And my mother and father always encouraged me. (At every graduation they were behindthe stunning flash of the camera when I turned to look at the crowd.)As important as these factors were, however, they account inadequately for my academic advance. Nor dothey suggest what an odd success I managed. For although I was a very good student, I was also a very bad student. Iwas a “scholarship boy,” a certain kind of scholarship boy. Always successful, I was always unconfident.Exhilarated by my progress. Sad. I became the prized student—anxious and eager to learn. Too eager, tooanxious—an imitative and unoriginal pupil. My brother and two sisters enjoyed the advantages I did, and they grewto be as successful as I, but none of them ever seemed so anxious about their schooling. A second grade student, Iwas the one who came home and corrected the “simple” grammatical mistakes of our parents. (“Two negatives makea positive.”) Proudly I announced—to my family’s startled silence—that a teacher had said I was losing all trace of aSpanish accent. I was oddly annoyed when I was unable to get parental help with a homework assignment. The nightmy father tried to help me with an arithmetic exercise, he kept reading the instructions, each time more deliberately,until I pried the textbook out of his hands, saying, “I’ll try to figure it out some more by myself.”When I reached the third grade, I outgrew such behavior. I became more tactful, careful to keep separatethe two very different worlds of my day. But then, with ever-increasing intensity, I devoted myself to my studies. Ibecame bookish, puzzling to all my family. Ambition set me apart. When my brother saw me struggling home withstacks of library books, he would laugh, shouting: “Hey, Four Eyes!” My father opened a closet one day and wasstartled to find me inside, reading a novel. My mother would find me reading when I was supposed to be asleep orhelping around the house or playing outside. In a voice angry or worried or just curious, she’d ask: “What do you seein your books?” It became the family’s joke. When I was called and wouldn’t reply, someone would say I must behiding under my bed with a book.(How did I manage my success?)What I am about to say to you has taken me more than twenty years to admit: A primary reason for mysuccess in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life Ienjoyed before becoming a student. That simple realization! For years I never spoke to anyone about it. Nevermentioned a thing to my family or my teachers or classmates. From a very early age, I understood enough, justenough about my classroom experiences to keep what I knew repressed, hidden beneath layers of embarrassment.Not until my last months as a graduate student, nearly thirty years old, was it possible for me to think much about thereasons for my academic success. Only then. At the end of my schooling, I needed to determine how far I had movedfrom my past. The adult finally confronted, and now must publicly say, what the child shuddered from knowing andcould never admit to himself or to those many faces that smiled at his every success. (“Your parents must be very 2proud. ..”)IAt the end, in the British Museum (too distracted to finish my dissertation) for weeks I read, speed-read,books by modern educational theorists, only to find infrequent and slight mention of students like me. (Much more iswritten about the more typical case, the lower-class student who barely is helped by his schooling.) Then one day,leafing through Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, I found, in his description of the scholarship boy, myself.For the first time I realized that there were other students like me, and so I was able to frame the meaning of myacademic success, its consequent price-the loss.Hoggart’s description is distinguished, at least initially, by deep understanding. What he grasps very well isthat the scholarship boy must move between environments, his home and the classroom, which are at culturalextremes, opposed. With his family, the boy has the intense pleasure of intimacy, the family’s consolation in feelingpublic alienation. Lavish emotions texture home life. Then, at school, the instruction bids him to trust lonely reasonprimarily. Immediate needs set the pace of his parents’ lives. From his mother and father the boy learns to trustspontaneity and nonrational ways of knowing. Then, at school, there is mental calm. Teachers emphasize the valueof a reflectiveness that opens a space between thinking and immediate action.Years of schooling must pass before the boy will be able to sketch the cultural differences in his day asabstractly as this. But he senses those differences early. Perhaps as early as the night he brings home an assignmentfrom school and finds the house too noisy for study.He has to be more and more alone, if he is going to “get on.” He will have, probablyunconsciously, to oppose the ethos of the hearth, the intense gregariousness of the working-classfamily group. Since everything centres upon the living-room, there is unlikely to be a room of hisown; the bedrooms are cold and inhospitable, and to warm them or the front room, if there is one,would not only be expensive, but would require an imaginative leap—out of the tradition—whichmost families are not capable of making. There is a corner of the living-room table. On the otherside Mother is ironing, the wireless is on, someone is singing a snatch of song or Father saysintermittently whatever comes into his head. The boy has to cut himself off mentally, so as to dohis homework, as well as he can.The next day, the lesson is as apparent at school. There are even rows of desks. Discussion is ordered. The boy mustrehearse his thoughts and raise his hand before speaking out in a loud voice to an audience of classmates. And thereis time enough, and silence, to think about ideas (big ideas) never considered at home by his parents.Not for the working-class child alone is adjustment to the classroom difficult. Good schooling requires thatany student alter early childhood habits. But the working-class child is usually least prepared for the change. And,unlike many middle-class children, he goes home and sees in his parents a way of life not only different but starklyopposed to that of the classroom. (He enters the house and hears his parents talking in ways his teachers discourage.)Without extraordinary determination and the great assistance of others—at home and at school—there islittle chance for success. Typically most working-class children are barely changed by the classroom. The exceptionsucceeds. The relative few become scholarship students. Of these, Richard Hoggart estimates, most manage a fairlygraceful transition. Somehow they learn to live in the two very different worlds of their day. There are some others,however, those Hoggart pejoratively terms “scholarship boys,” for whom success comes with special anxiety.Scholarship boy: good student, troubled son. The child is “moderately endowed,” intellectually mediocre, Hoggartsupposes—though it may be more pertinent to note the special qualities of temperament in the child. High-strungchild. Brooding. Sensitive. Haunted by the knowledge that one chooses to become a student. (Education is not aninevitable or natural step in growing up.) Here is a child who cannot forget that his academic success distances himfrom a life he loved, even from his own memory of himself.Initially, he wavers, balances allegiance. (“The boy is himself [until he reaches, say, the upper forms] verymuch of both the worlds of home and school. He is enormously obedient to the dictates of the world of school, butemotionally still strongly wants to continue as part of the family circle.”) Gradually, necessarily, the balance is lost.The boy needs to spend more and more time studying, each night enclosing himself in the silence permitted andrequired by intense concentration. He takes his first step toward academic success, away from his family.From the very first days, through the years following, it will be with his parents—the figures of lost 3authority, the persons toward whom he feels deepest love-that the change will be most powerfully measured. Aseparation will unravel between them. Advancing in his studies, the boy notices that his mother and father have notchanged as much as he. Rather, when he sees them, they often remind him of the person he once was and the life heearlier shared with them. He realizes what some Romantics also know when they praise the working class for thecapacity for human closeness, qualities of passion and spontaneity, that the rest of us experience in like measure onlyin the earliest part of our youth. For the Romantic, this doesn’t make working-class life childish. Working-class lifechallenges precisely because it is an adult way of life.The scholarship boy reaches a different conclusion. He cannot afford to admire his parents. (How could heand still pursue such a contrary life?) He permits himself embarrassment at their lack of education. And to evadenostalgia for the life he has lost, he concentrates on the benefits education will bestow upon him. He becomesespecially ambitious. Without the support of old certainties and consolations, almost mechanically, he assumes theprocedures and doctrines of the classroom. The kind of allegiance the young student might have given his motherand father only days earlier, he transfers to the teacher, the new figure of authority. “[The scholarship boy] tends tomake a father-figure of his form-master,” Hoggart observes.But Hoggart’s calm prose only makes me recall the urgency with which I came to idolize my grammarschool teachers. I began by imitating their accents, using their diction, trusting their every direction. The very firstfacts they dispensed, I grasped with awe. Any book they told me to read, I read—then waited for them to tell mewhich books I enjoyed. Their every casual opinion I came to adopt and to trumpet when I returned home. I stayedafter school “to help”—to get my teacher’s undivided attention. It was the nun’s encouragement that mattered mostto me. (She understood exactly what—my parents never seemed to appraise so well— all my achievementsentailed.) Memory gently caressed each word of praise bestowed in the classroom so that compliments teachers paidme years ago come quickly to mind even today.The enthusiasm I felt in second-grade classes I flaunted before both my parents. The docile, obedientstudent came home a shrill and precocious son who insisted on correcting and teaching his parents with the remark:“My teacher told us. . .”I intended to hurt my mother and father. I was still angry at them for having encouraged me towardclassroom English. But gradually this anger was exhausted, replaced by guilt as school grew more and moreattractive to me. I grew increasingly successful, a talkative student. My hand was raised in the classroom; I yearnedto answer any question. At home, life was less noisy than it had been. (I spoke to classmates and teachers more ofteneach day than to family members.) Quiet at home, I sat with my papers for hours each night. I never forgot thatschooling had irretrievably changed my family’s life. That knowledge, however, did not weaken ambition. Instead, itstrengthened resolve. Those times I remembered the loss of my past with regret, I quickly reminded myself of all thethings my teachers could give me. (They could make me an educated man.) I tightened my grip on pencil and books.I evaded nostalgia. Tried hard to forget. But one does not forget by trying to forget. One only remembers. Iremembered too well that education had changed my family’s life. I would not have become a scholarship boy had Inot so often remembered.Once she was sure that her children knew English, my mother would tell us, “You should keep up yourSpanish.” Voices playfully groaned in response. “¡Pochos!” my mother would tease. I listened silently.After a while, I grew more calm at home. I developed tact. A fourth grade student, I was no longer theshow-off in front of my parents. I became a conventionally dutiful son, politely affectionate, cheerful enough,even—for reasons beyond choosing—my father’s favorite. And much about my family life was easy then,comfortable, happy in the rhythm of our living together: hearing my father getting ready for work; eating thebreakfast my mother had made me; looking up from a novel to hear my brother or one of my sisters playing withfriends in the backyard; in winter, coming upon the house all lighted up after dark.But withheld from my mother and father was any mention of what most mattered to me: the extraordinaryexperience of first-learning. Late afternoon: in the midst of preparing dinner, my mother would come up behind mewhile I was trying to read. Her head just over mine, her breath warmly scented with food. “What are you reading?”Or, “Tell me all about your new courses.” I would barely respond, “Just the usual things, nothing special.” (A halfsmile, then silence. Her head moving back in the silence. Silence! Instead of the flood of intimate sounds that hadonce flowed smoothly between us, there was this silence.) After dinner, I would rush to a bedroom with papers andbooks. As often as possible, I resisted parental pleas to “save lights” by coming to the kitchen to work. I kept somuch, so often, to myself. Sad. Enthusiastic. Troubled by the excitement of coming upon new ideas. Eager.Fascinated by the promising texture of a brand-new book. I hoarded the pleasures of learning. Alone for hours.Enthralled. Nervous. I rarely looked away from my books—or back on my memories. Nights when relatives visited 4and the front rooms were warmed by Spanish sounds, I slipped quietly out of the house.It mattered that education was changing me. It never ceased to matter. My brother and sisters would giggleat our mother’s mispronounced words. They’d correct her gently. My mother laughed girlishly one night, trying notto pronounce sheep as ship. From a distance I listened sullenly. From that distance, pretending not to notice onanother occasion, I saw my father looking at the title pages of my library books. That was the scene on my mindwhen I walked home with a fourth-grade companion and heard him say that his parents read to him every night. (Astrange-sounding book—Winnie the Pooh.) Immediately, I wanted to know, “What is it like?” My companion,however, thought I wanted to know about the plot of the book. Another day, my mother surprised me by asking for a“nice” book to read. “Something not too hard you think I might like.” Carefully I chose one, Willa Cather’s MyAntonia. But when, several weeks later, I happened to see it next to her bed unread except for the first few pages, Iwas furious and suddenly wanted to cry. I grabbed up the book and took it back to my room and placed it in itsplace, alphabetically on my shelf.“Your parents must be very proud of you.” People began to say that to me about the time I was in sixthgrade. To answer affirmatively, I’d smile. Shyly I’d smile, never betraying my sense of the irony: I was not proud ofmy mother and father. I was embarrassed by their lack of education. It was not that I ever thought they were stupid,though stupidly I took for granted their enormous native intelligence. Simply, what mattered to me was that theywere not like my teachers.But, “Why didn’t you tell us about the award?” my mother demanded, her frown weakened by pride. At thegrammar school ceremony several weeks after, her eyes were brighter than the trophy I’d won. Pushing back the hairfrom my forehead, she whispered that I had “shown” the gringos. A few minutes later, I heard my father speak to myteacher and felt ashamed of his labored, accented words. Then guilty for the shame. I felt such contrary feelings.(There is no simple road-map through the heart of the scholarship boy.) My teacher was so soft-spoken and herwords were edged sharp and clean. I admired her until it seemed to me that she spoke too carefully. Sensing that shewas condescending to them, I became nervous. Resentful. Protective. I tried to move my parents away. “You bothmust be very proud of Richard,” the nun said. They responded quickly. (They were proud.) “We are proud of all ourchildren.” Then this afterthought: “They sure didn’t get their brains from us.” They all laughed. I smiled.Tightening the irony into a knot was the knowledge that my parents were always behind me. They madesuccess possible. They evened the path. They sent their children to parochial schools because the nuns “teachbetter.” They paid a tuition they couldn’t afford. They spoke English to us.For their children my parents wanted chances they never had—an easier way. It saddened my mother tolearn that some relatives forced their children to start working right after high school. To her children she would say,“Get all the education you can.” In schooling she recognized the key to job advancement. And with the remark sheremembered her past.As a girl new to America my mother had been awarded a high school diploma by teachers too careless orbusy to notice that she hardly spoke English. On her own, she determined to learn how to type. That skill gother jobs typing envelopes in letter shops, and it encouraged in her an optimism about the possibility of advancement.(Each morning when her sisters put on uniforms, she chose a bright-colored dress.) The years of young womanhoodpassed, and her typing speed increased. She also became an excellent speller of words she mispronounced. “AndI’ve never been to college,” she’d say, smiling, when her children asked her to spell words they were too lazy to lookup in a dictionary.Typing, however, was dead-end work. Finally frustrating. When her youngest child started high school, mymother got a full-time office job once again. (Her paycheck combined with my father’s to make us—in fact—whatwe had already become in our imagination of ourselves— middle class.) She worked then for the (California) stategovernment in numbered civil service positions secured by examinations. The old ambition of her youth wasrekindled. During the lunch hour, she consulted bulletin boards for announcements of openings. One day she sawmention of something called an “anti-poverty agency.” A typing job. A glamorous job, part of the governor’s staff.“A knowledge of Spanish required.” Without hesitation she applied and became nervous only when the job wassuddenly hers.“Everyone comes to work all dressed up,” she reported at night. And didn’t need to say more than that herco-workers wouldn’t let her answer the phones. She was only a typist, after all, albeit a very fast typist. And anexcellent speller. One morning there was a letter to be sent to a Washington cabinet officer. On the dictating tape, avoice referred to urban guerrillas. My mother typed (the wrong word, correctly): “gorillas.” The mistake horrifiedthe anti-poverty bureaucrats who shortly after arranged to have her returned to her previous position. She would gono further. So she willed her ambition to their children. “Get all the education you can; with an education you can do 5anything.” (With a good education she could have done anything.)When I was in high school, I admitted to my mother that I planned to become a teacher someday. Thatseemed to please her. But I never tried to explain that it was not the occupation of teaching I yearned for as much asit was something more elusive: I wanted to be like my teachers, to possess their knowledge, to assume theirauthority, their confidence, even to assume a teacher’s persona.In contrast to my mother, my father never verbally encouraged his children’s academic success. Nor did heoften praise us. My mother had to remind him to “say something” to one of his children who scored some academicsuccess. But whereas my mother saw in education the opportunity for job advancement, my father recognized thateducation provided an even more startling possibility: it could enable a person to escape from a life of mere labor.In Mexico, orphaned when he was eight, my father left school to work as an “apprentice” for an uncle.Twelve years later, he left Mexico in frustration and arrived in America. He had great expectations then of becomingan engineer. (“Work for my hands and my head.”) He knew a Catholic priest who promised to get him moneyenough to study full time for a high school diploma. But the promises came to nothing. Instead there was a darksuccession of warehouse, cannery, and factory jobs. After work he went to night school along with my mother. Ayear, two passed. Nothing much changed, except that fatigue worked its way into the bone; then everything changed.He didn’t talk anymore of becoming an engineer. He stayed outside on the steps of the school while my mother wentinside to learn typing and shorthand.By the time I was born, my father worked at “clean” jobs. For a time he was a janitor at a fancy departmentstore. (“Easy work; the machines do it all.”) Later he became a dental technician. (“Simple.”) But by then he waspessimistic about the ultimate meaning of work and the possibility of ever escaping its claims. In some of my earliestmemories of him, my father already seems aged by fatigue. (He has never really grown old like my mother.) Fromboyhood to manhood, I have remembered him in a single image: seated, asleep on the sofa, his head thrown back ina hideous corpse-like grin, the evening newspaper spread out before him. “But look at all you’ve accomplished,” hisbest friend said to him once. My father said nothing. Only smiled.It was my father who laughed when I claimed to be tired by reading and writing. It was he who teased mefor having soft hands. (He seemed to sense that some great achievement of leisure was implied by my papers andbooks.) It was my father who became angry while watching on television some woman at the Miss America contesttell the announcer that she was going to college. (“Majoring in fine arts.”) “College!” he snarled. He despised thetrivialization of higher education, the inflated grades and cheapened diplomas, the half education that so often passedas mass education in my generation.It was my father again who wondered why I didn’t display my awards on the wall of my bedroom. He saidhe liked to go to doctors’ offices and see their certificates and degrees on the wall. (“Nice.”) My citations fromschool got left in closets at home. The gleaming figure astride one of my trophies was broken, wingless, after hittingthe ground. My medals were placed in a jar of loose change. And when I lost my high school diploma, my fatherfound it as it was about to be thrown out with the trash. Without telling me, he put it away with his own things forsafekeeping.These memories slammed together at the instant of hearing that refrain familiar to all scholarship students:“Your parents must be proud Yes, my parents were proud. I knew it. But my parents regarded my progress withmore than mere pride. They endured my early precocious behavior—but with what private anger and humiliation?As their children got older and would come home to challenge ideas both of them held, they argued beforesubmitting to the force of logic or superior factual evidence with the disclaimer, “It’s what we were taught in ourtime to believe.” These discussions ended abruptly, though my mother remembered them on other occasions whenshe complained that our “big ideas” were going to our heads. More acute was her complaint that the family wasn’tclose anymore, like some others she knew. Why weren’t we close, “more in the Mexican style”? Everyone is soprivate, she added. And she mimicked the yes and no answers she got in reply to her questions. Why didn’t we talkmore? (My father never asked.) I never said.I was the first in my family who asked to leave home when it came time to go to college. I had beenadmitted to Stanford, one hundred miles away. My departure would only make physically apparent the separationthat had occurred long before. But it was going too far. In the months preceding my leaving, I heard the question mymother never asked except indirectly. In the hot kitchen, tired at the end of her workday, she demanded to know,“Why aren’t the colleges here in Sacramento good enough for you? They are for your brother and sister.” In themiddle of a car ride, not turning to face me, she wondered, “Why do you need to go so far away?” Late at night,ironing, she said with disgust, “Why do you have to put us through this big expense? You know your scholarshipwill never cover it all.” But when September came there was a rush to get everything ready. In a bedroom that last 6night I packed the big brown valise, and my mother sat nearby sewing initials onto the clothes I would take. And shesaid no more about my leaving.Months later, two weeks of Christmas vacation: the first hours home were the hardest. (“What’s new?”) Myparents and I sat in the kitchen for a conversation. (But, lacking the same words to develop our sentences and toshape our interests, what was there to say? What could I tell them of the term paper I had just finished on the“universality of Shakespeare’s appeal”?) I mentioned only small, obvious things: my dormitory life; weekend trips Ihad taken; random events. They responded with news of their own. (One was almost grateful for a family crisisabout which there was much to discuss.) We tried to make our conversation seem like more than an interview.IIFrom an early age I knew that my mother and father could read and write both Spanish and English. I hadobserved my father making his way through what, I now suppose, must have been income tax forms. On otheroccasions I waited apprehensively while my mother read onion-paper letters airmailed from Mexico with news of arelative’s illness or death. For both my parents, however, reading was something done out of necessity and asquickly as possible. Never did I see either of them read an entire book. Nor did I see them read for pleasure. Theirreading consisted of work manuals, prayer books, newspaper, recipes.Richard Hoggart imagines how, at home,the scholarship boy sees strewn around, and reads regularly himself, magazines which are nevermentioned at school, which seem not to belong to the world to which the school introduces him; atschool he hears about and reads books never mentioned at home. When he brings those books intothe house they do not take their place with other books which the family are reading, for oftenthere are none or almost none; his books look, rather, like strange tools.In our house each school year would begin with my mother’s careful instruction: “Don’t write in your books so wecan sell them at the end of the year.” The remark was echoed in public by my teachers, but only in part: “Boys andgirls, don’t write in your books. You must learn to treat them with great care and respect.”OPEN THE DOORS OF YOUR MIND WITH BOOKS, read the red and white poster over the nun’s deskin early September. It soon was apparent to me that reading was the classroom’s central activity. Each course had itsown book. And the information gathered from a book was unquestioned. READ TO LEARN, the sign on the walladvised in December. I privately wondered: What was the connection between reading and learning? Did one learnsomething only by reading it? Was an idea only an idea if it could be written down? In June, CONSIDER BOOKSYOUR BEST FRIENDS. Friends? Reading was, at best, only a chore. I needed to look up whole paragraphs ofwords in a dictionary. Lines of type were dizzying, the eye having to move slowly across the page, then down, andacross. . . . The sentences of the first books I read were coolly impersonal. Toned hard. What most bothered me,however, was the isolation reading required. To console myself for the loneliness I’d feel when I read, I tried readingin a very soft voice. Until: “Who is doing all that talking to his neighbor?” Shortly after, remedial reading classeswere arranged for me with a very old nun.At the end of each school day, for nearly six months, I would meet with her in the tiny room that served asthe school’s library but was actually only a storeroom for used textbooks and a vast collection of NationalGeographics. Everything about our sessions pleased me: the smallness of the room; the noise of the janitor’s broomhitting the edge of the long hallway outside the door; the green of the sun, lighting the wall; and the old woman’sface blurred white with a beard. Most of the time we took turns. I began with my elementary text. Sentences ofastonishing simplicity seemed to me lifeless and drab: “The boys ran from the rain.. . . She wanted to sing. . . . Thekite rose in the blue.” Then the old nun would read from her favorite books, usually biographies of early Americanpresidents. Playfully she ran through complex sentences, calling the words alive with her voice, making it seem thatthe author somehow was speaking directly to me. I smiled just to listen to her. I sat there and sensed for the very firsttime some possibility of fellowship between a reader and a writer, a communication, never intimate like that I heardspoken words at home convey, but one nonetheless personal.One day the nun concluded a session by asking me why I was so reluctant to read by myself. I tried toexplain; said something about the way written words made me feel all alone—almost, I wanted to add but didn’t, aswhen I spoke to myself in a room just emptied of furniture. She studied my face as I spoke; she seemed to bewatching more than listening. In an uneventful voice she replied that I had nothing to fear. Didn’t I realize that 7reading would open up whole new worlds? A book could open doors for me. It could introduce me to people andshow me places I never imagined existed. She gestured toward the bookshelves. (Bare-breasted African womendanced, and the shiny hubcaps of automobiles on the back covers of the Geographic gleamed in my mind.) I listenedwith respect. But her words were not very influential. I was thinking then of another consequence of literacy, one Iwas too shy to admit but nonetheless trusted. Books were going to make me “educated.” That confidence enabledme, several months later, to overcome my fear of the silence.In fourth grade I embarked upon a grandiose reading program. “Give me the names of important books,” Iwould say to startled teachers. They soon found out that I had in mind “adult books.” I ignored their suggestion ofanything I suspected was written for children. (Not until I was in college, as a result, did I read Huckleberry Finn orAlice’s Adventures in Wonderland.) Instead, I read The Scarlet Letter and Franklin’s Autobiography. And whatever Iread I read for extra credit. Each time I finished a book, I reported the achievement to a teacher and basked in thepraise my effort earned. Despite my best efforts, however, there seemed to be more and more books I needed to read.At the library I would literally tremble as I came upon whole shelves of books I hadn’t read. So I read and I read andI read: Great Expectations; all the short stories of Kipling; The Babe Ruth Story; the entire first volume of theEncyclopedia Britannica (A—ANSTEY); the Iliad; Moby Dick; Gone with the Wind; The Good Earth; Ramona;Forever Amber; The Lives of the Saints; Crime and Punishment; The Pearl. . . . Librarians who initially frownedwhen I checked out the maximum ten books at a time started saving books they thought I might like. Teachers wouldsay to the rest of the class, “I only wish the rest of you took reading as seriously as Richard obviously does.”But at home I would hear my mother wondering, “What do you see in your books?” (Was reading a hobbylike her knitting? Was so much reading even healthy for a boy? Was it the sign of “brains”? Or was it just aconvenient excuse for not helping about the house on Saturday mornings?) Always, “What do you see. . . ?“What did I see in my books? I had the idea that they were crucial for my academic success, though Icouldn’t have said exactly how or why. In the sixth grade I simply concluded that what gave a book its value wassome major idea or theme it contained. If that core essence could be mined and memorized, I would become learnedlike my teachers. I decided to record in a notebook the themes of the books that I read. After reading RobinsonCrusoe, I wrote that its theme was “the value of learning to live by oneself.” When I completed Wuthering Heights, Inoted the danger of “letting emotions get out of control.” Rereading these brief moralistic appraisals usually left medisheartened. I couldn’t believe that they were really the source of reading’s value. But for many more years, theyconstituted the only means I had of describing to myself the educational value of books.In spite of my earnestness, I found reading a pleasurable activity. I came to enjoy the lonely good companyof books. Early on weekday mornings, I’d read in my bed. I’d feel a mysterious comfort then, reading in the dawnquiet—the blue-gray silence interrupted by the occasional churning of the refrigerator motor a few rooms away orthe more distant sounds of a city bus beginning its run. On weekends I’d go to the public library to read, surroundedby old men and women. Or, if the weather was fine, I would take my books to the park and read in the shade of atree. A warm summer evening was my favorite reading time. Neighbors would leave for vacation and I would watertheir lawns. I would sit through the twilight on the front porches or in backyards, reading to the cool, whirlingsounds of the sprinklers.I also had favorite writers. But often those writers I enjoyed most I was least able to value. When I readWilliam Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, I was immediately pleased by the narrator’s warmth and the charm of hisstory. But as quickly I became suspicious. A book so enjoyable to read couldn’t be very “important.” Anothersummer I determined to read all the novels of Dickens. Reading his fat novels, I loved the feeling I got— after thefirst hundred pages—of being at home in a fictional world where I knew the names of the characters and cared aboutwhat was going to happen to them. And it bothered me that I was forced away at the conclusion, when the fictionclosed tight, like a fortune-teller’s fist—the futures of all the major characters neatly resolved. I never knew how totake such feelings seriously, however. Nor did I suspect that these experiences could be part of a novel’s meaning.Still, there were pleasures to sustain me after I’d finish my books. Carrying a volume back to the library, I would bepleased by its weight. I’d run my fingers along the edge of the pages and marvel at the breadth of my achievement.Around my room, growing stacks of paperback books reenforced my assurance.I entered high school having read hundreds of books. My habit of reading made me a confident speaker andwriter of English. Reading also enabled me to sense something of the shape, the major concerns, of Western thought.(I was able to say something about Dante and Descartes and Engels and James Baldwin in my high school termpapers.) In these various ways, books brought me academic success as I hoped that they would. But I was not a goodreader. Merely bookish, I lacked a point of view when I read. Rather, I read in order to acquire a point of view. Ivacuumed books for epigrams, scraps of information, ideas, themes—anything to fill the hollow within me and make 8me feel educated. When one of my teachers suggested to his drowsy tenth-grade English class that a person couldnot have a “complicated idea” until he had read at least two thousand books, I heard the remark without detectingeither its irony or its very complicated truth. I merely determined to compile a list of all the books I had ever read.Harsh with myself, I included only once a title I might have read several times. (How, after all, could one read abook more than once?) And I included only those books over a hundred pages in length. (Could anything shorter bea book?)There was yet another high school list I compiled. One day I came across a newspaper article about theretirement of an English professor at a nearby state college. The article was accompanied by a list of the “hundredmost important books of Western Civilization.” “More than anything else in my life,” the professor told the reporterwith finality, “these books have made me all that I am.” That was the kind of remark I couldn’t ignore. I clipped outthe list and kept it for the several months it took me to read all of the titles. Most books, of course, I barelyunderstood. While reading Plato’s Republic, for instance, I needed to keep looking at the book jacket comments toremind myself what the text was about. Nevertheless, with the special patience and superstition of a scholarship boy,I looked at every word of the text. And by the time I reached the last word, relieved, I convinced myself that I hadread The Republic. In a ceremony of great pride, I solemnly crossed Plato off my list.IIIThe scholarship boy pleases most when he is young—the working-class child struggling for academicsuccess. To his teachers, he offers great satisfaction; his success is their proudest achievement. Many other personsoffer to help him. A businessman learns the boy’s story and promises to underwrite part of the cost of his collegeeducation. A woman leaves him her entire library of several hundred books when she moves. His progress isfeatured in a newspaper article. Many people seem happy for him. They marvel. “How did you manage so fast?”From all sides, there is lavish praise and encouragement.In his grammar school classroom, however, the boy already makes students around him uneasy. They scornhis desire to succeed. They scorn him for constantly wanting the teacher’s attention and praise. “Kiss Ass,” they callhim when his hand swings up in response to every question he hears. Later, when he makes it to college, no one willmock him aloud. But he detects annoyance on the faces of some students and even some teachers who watch him. Itpuzzles him often. In college, then in graduate school, he behaves much as he always has. If anything is differentabout him it is that he dares to anticipate the successful conclusion of his studies. At last he feels that he belongs inthe classroom, and this is exactly the source of the dissatisfaction he causes. To many persons around him, heappears too much the academic. There may be some things about him that recall his beginnings—his shabby clothes;his persistent poverty; or his dark skin (in those cases when it symbolizes his parents’ disadvantaged condition)—butthey only make clear how far he has moved from his past. He has used education to remake himself.It bothers his fellow academics to face this. They will not say why exactly. (They sneer.) But theirexpectations become obvious when they are disappointed. They expect—they want—a student less changed by hisschooling. If the scholarship boy, from a past so distant from the classroom, could remain in some basic wayunchanged, he would be able to prove that it is possible for anyone to become educated without basically changingfrom the person one was.Here is no fabulous hero, no idealized scholar-worker. The scholarship boy does not straddle, cannotreconcile, the two great opposing cultures of his life. His success is unromantic and plain. He sits in the classroomand offers those sitting beside him no calming reassurance about their own lives. He sits in the seminar room—aman with brown skin, the son of working-class Mexican immigrant parents. (Addressing the professor at the head ofthe table, his voice catches with nervousness.) There is no trace of his parents’ in his speech. Instead heapproximates the accents of teachers and classmates. Coming from him those sounds seem suddenly odd. Odd too isthe effect produced when he uses academic jargon—bubbles at the tip of his tongue: “Topos. . . negative capability. .. vegetation imagery in Shakespearean comedy.” He lifts an opinion from Coleridge, takes something else from Fryeor Empson or Leavis. He even repeats exactly his professor’s earlier comment. All his ideas are clearly borrowed.He seems to have no thought of his own. He chatters while his listeners smile-their look one of disdain.When he is older and thus when so little of the person he was survives, the scholarship boy makes only tooapparent his profound lack of self-confidence. This is the conventional assessment that even Richard Hoggartrepeats:The scholarship boy tends to over-stress the importance of examinations, of the piling-up of 9knowledge and of received opinions. He discovers a technique of apparent learning, of theacquiring of facts rather than of the handling and use of facts. He learns how to receive a purelyliterate education, one using only a small part of the personality and challenging only a limitedarea of his being. He begins to see life as a ladder, as permanent examination with some praise andsome further exhortation at each stage. He becomes an expert imbiber and doler-out; hiscompetence will vary, but will rarely be accompanied by genuine enthusiasms. He rarely feels thereality of knowledge, of other men’s thoughts and imaginings, on his own pulses. .. . He hassomething of the blinkered pony about him....But this is criticism more accurate than fair. The scholarship boy is a very bad student. He is the great mimic; acollector of thoughts, not a thinker; the very last person in class who ever feels obliged to have an opinion of hisown. In large part, however, the reason he is such a bad student is because he realizes more often and more acutelythan most other students— than Hoggart himself—that education requires radical self-reformation. As a very youngboy, regarding his parents, as he struggles with an early homework assignment, he knows this too well. That is whyhe lacks self-assurance. He does not forget that the classroom is responsible for remaking him. He relies on histeacher, depends on all that he hears in the classroom and reads in his books. He becomes in every obvious way theworst student, a dummy mouthing the opinions of others. But he would not be so bad—nor would he become sosuccessful, a scholarship boy—if he did not accurately perceive that the best synonym for primary “education” is“imitation.”Those who would take seriously the boy’s success—and his failure— would be forced to realize how greatis the change any academic undergoes, how far one must move from one’s past. It is easiest to ignore suchconsiderations. So little is said about the scholarship boy in pages and pages of educational literature. Nothing is saidof the silence that comes to separate the boy from his parents. Instead, one hears proposals for increasing the self-esteem of students and encouraging early intellectual independence. Paragraphs glitter with a constellation of termslike creativity and originality. (Ignored altogether is the function of imitation in a student’s life.) Radicaleducationalists meanwhile complain that ghetto schools “oppress” students by trying to mold them, stifling nativecharacteristics. The truer critique would be just the reverse: not that schools change ghetto students too much, butthat while they might promote the occasional scholarship student, they change most students barely at all.From the story of the scholarship boy there is no specific pedagogy to glean. There is, however, a muchlarger lesson. His story makes clear that education is a long, unglamourous, even demeaning process—a nurturingnever natural to the person one was before one entered a classroom. At once different from most other students, thescholarship boy is also the archetypal “good student.” He exaggerates the difficulty of being a student, but hisexaggeration reveals a general predicament. Others are changed by their schooling as much as he. They too must re-form themselves. They must develop the skill of memory long before they become truly critical thinkers. And whenthey read Plato for the first several times, it will be with awe more than deep comprehension.The impact of schooling on the scholarship boy is only more apparent to the boy himself and to others.Finally, although he may be laughable-a blinkered pony—the boy will not let his critics forget their own change. Heends up too much like them. When he speaks, they hear themselves echoed. In his pedantry, they trace their own.His ambitions are theirs. If his failure were singular, they might readily pity him. But he is more troubling than that.They would not scorn him if this were not so.IVLike me, Hoggart’s imagined scholarship boy spends most of his years in the classroom afraid to long forhis past. Only at the very end of his schooling does the boy-man become nostalgic. In this sudden change of heart,Richard Hoggart notes:He longs for the membership he lost, “he pines for some Nameless Eden where he never was.”The nostalgia is the stronger and the more ambiguous because he is really “in quest of his ownabsconded self yet scared to find it.” He both wants to go back and yet thinks he has gone beyondhis class, feels himself weighted with knowledge of his own and their situation, which hereafterforbids him the simpler pleasures of his father and mother....According to Hoggart, the scholarship boy grows nostalgic because he remains the uncertain scholar, bright enough 10to have moved from his past, yet unable to feel easy, a part of a community of academics.This analysis, however, only partially suggests what happened to me in my last year as a graduate student.When I traveled to London to write a dissertation on English Renaissance literature, I was finally confident ofmembership in a “community of scholars.” But the pleasure that confidence gave me faded rapidly. After only twoor three months in the reading room of the British Museum, it became clear that I had joined a lonely community.Around me each day were dour faces eclipsed by large piles of books. There were the regulars, like the old couplewho arrived every morning, each holding a loop of the shopping bag which contained all their notes. And there wasthe historian who chattered madly to herself. (“Oh dear! Oh! Now, what’s this? What? Oh, my!”) There were alsothe faces of young men and women worn by long study. And everywhere eyes turned away the moment our glanceaccidentally met. Some persons I sat beside day after day, yet we passed silently at the end of the day, strangers.Still, we were united by a common respect for the written word and for scholarship. We did form a union, thoughone in which we remained distant from one another.More profound and unsettling was the bond I recognized with those writers whose books I consulted.Whenever I opened a text that hadn’t been used for years, I realized that my special interests and skills united me toa mere handful of academics. We formed an exclusive—eccentric!— society, separated from others who wouldnever care or be able to share our concerns. (The pages I turned were stiff like layers of dead skin.) I began towonder: Who, beside my dissertation director and a few faculty members, would ever read what I wrote? And: Wasmy dissertation much more than an act of social withdrawal? These questions went unanswered in the silence of theMuseum reading room. They remained to trouble me after I’d leave the library each afternoon and feel myselfshy—unsteady, speaking simple sentences at the grocer’s or the butcher’s on my way back to my bed-sitter.Meanwhile my file cards accumulated. A professional, I knew exactly how to search a book for pertinentinformation. I could quickly assess and summarize the usability of the many books I consulted. But whenever Istarted to write, I knew too much (and not enough) to be able to write anything but sentences that were overlycautious, timid, strained brittle under the heavy weight of footnotes and qualifications. I seemed unable to dare apassionate statement. I felt drawn by professionalism to the edge of sterility, capable of no more than pedantic,lifeless, unassailable prose.Then nostalgia began.After years spent unwilling to admit its attractions, I gestured nostalgically toward the past. I yearned forthat time when I had not been so alone. I became impatient with books. I wanted experience more immediate. Ifeared the library’s silence. I silently scorned the gray, timid faces around me. I grew to hate the growing pages ofmy dissertation on genre and Renaissance literature. (In my mind I heard relatives laughing as they tried to makesense of its title.) I wanted something—I couldn’t say exactly what. I told myself that I wanted a more passionatelife. And a life less thoughtful. And above all, I wanted to be less alone. One day I heard some Spanish academicswhispering back and forth to each other, and their sounds seemed ghostly voices recalling my life. Yearning becamepreoccupation then. Boyhood memories beckoned, flooded my mind. (Laughing intimate voices. Bounding up thefront steps of the porch. A sudden embrace inside the door.)For weeks after, I turned to books by educational experts. I needed to learn how far I had moved from mypast—to determine how fast I would be able to recover something of it once again. But I found little. Only a chapterin a book by Richard Hoggart. . . . I left the reading room and the circle of faces.I came home. After the year in England, I spent three summer months living with my mother and father,relieved by how easy it was to be home. It no longer seemed very important to me that we had little to say. I felt easysitting and eating and walking with them. I watched them, nevertheless, looking for evidence of those elastic, sturdystrands that bind generations in a web of inheritance. I thought as I watched my mother one night: of course a friendhad been right when she told me that I gestured and laughed just like my mother. Another time I saw for myself: myfather’s eyes were much like my own, constantly watchful.But after the early relief, this return, came suspicion, nagging until I realized that I had not neatlysidestepped the impact of schooling. My desire to do so was precisely the measure of how much I remained anacademic. Negatively (for that is how this idea first occurred to me): my need to think so much and so abstractlyabout my parents and our relationship was in itself an indication of my long education. My father and mother did notpass their time thinking about the cultural meanings of their experience. It was I who described their daily lives withairy ideas. And yet, positively: the ability to consider experience so abstractly allowed me to shape into desire whatwould otherwise have remained indefinite, meaningless longing in the British Museum. If, because of my schooling,I had grown culturally separated from my parents, my education finally had given me ways of speaking and caringabout that fact. 11My best teachers in college and graduate school, years before, had tried to prepare me for this conclusion, Ithink, when they discussed texts of aristocratic pastoral literature. Faithfully, I wrote down all that they said. Imemorized it: “The praise of the unlettered by the highly educated is one of the primary themes of ‘elitist’literature.” But, “the importance of the praise given the unsolitary, richly passionate and spontaneous life is that itsimultaneously reflects the value of a reflective life.” I heard it all. But there was no way for any of it to mean verymuch to me. I was a scholarship boy at the time, busily laddering my way up the rungs of education. To pass anexamination, I copied down exactly what my teachers told me. It would require many more years of schooling (aninevitable miseducation) in which I came to trust the silence of reading and the habit of abstracting from immediateexperience—moving away from a life of closeness and immediacy I remembered with my parents, growingolder—before I turned unafraid to desire the past, and thereby achieved what had eluded me for so long—the end ofeducation.