This is the question I asked my roommate as I sat on my bed reading the Rodriguez article. Intrigued, she listened to my brief quotation and explanation of it but she only appeared perplexed. "Huh," she said and continued on her way out the door to work the night shift. "I'm gonna get the garbage. I'll see you tomorrow!"
I frowned and continued onward, engaged as ever, motivated to follow an intuition I learned quickly the two of us did not seem to share. I had the thought that we might, both of us coming from working class families, both be inspired to further our education and abandon the lifestyles of those at home we'd be taught to no longer desire, but I realized the fundamental divide really rested in our personalities and personal experiences. Like Rodriguez, and unlike my roommate, I had a number of factors encouraging me to continue pursuing education through the exploration of literature. Guided perhaps by teachers with a knack for grammar and a love of a good story, I found my desire becoming cultivated in their happy existences. I began to "imitate" their lives by doing the research and reading necessary to get one step closer to that happiness I perceived they had attained through such methods. Though I found inspiration, lessons, and insight in these pursuits, I hardly felt a tinge of happiness with each step I took down their paths. Eventually, I decided mostly unconsciously to throw away the high school newspaper editing team, the dreams of one day living in a city (I hate cities) and working for a publishing company, the aspiration of being a notable author attending conferences, all dreams and activities I was guided to partake in and enjoy, all because, as Rodriguez learned, I hardly had a sense of what I truly yearned for. I mistook glances into the windows of my future life as nostalgic glimpses at the past; but all I want is to tend the garden my parents started when I was a child and make it my own. These are all things I've known, I suppose, on some level, but connecting them in such a manner, as he has done, illuminated the tiny fibers holding together my life ladder that dangles down into the caverns of my hippocampus.
Veering away from the personal revelation, remembering I am still a full-time student and my garden is buried under two feet of snow, I'll move toward more theoretical matters. Rodriguez, as I have related, enters the conversation about the working class family child's confusing placement in the world of academia and his therefore confusing replacement back into the working class world of his parents. He ventures to prove that children like himself, like myself, struggle perhaps more than others born into a higher class with coming to terms with one's social orientation, caught between two very different lifestyles and dependent on the occurrence of influencing factors. He explains all such arguments through detailed personal accounts in which he evaluates his thoughts/feelings in the past and as he grew in age and experience to the time of his writing the article.
I believe Rodriguez had some terribly good insight, terrible only in the stark truth that education, though necessary to reach a point of decisive happiness, can appear futile and lose its appeal at such a point as he reached in graduate school; and good, in the sense that life potentially will thereafter feel more fully lived once one enters their own path and starts walking. I find his argument valuable in my understanding of the education system at large as I consider that his brutal, hard to accept honesty brightens the field of composition theory by improving one's literacy of their personal history and that of the system they work within. I feel far more informed, thanks certainly due to Rodriguez, about the unconscious life that I hoped such study would produce -- and confident about pursuing my desires.
Finally, my question: Being that Rodriguez offers the notion that "the end of education" can be achieved through an arduous mental journey, the "experience [that] had allowed me to shape into desire what would have been only indefinite longings," ending feelings of guilt, sadness, and anxiety and providing a new more fulfilling sense of achievement... should we believe those occasional "scholarship boy" working class children are destined for such an outcome? Or are the two of us just a couple of far too self-aware exceptions?
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