Scholarship Boy Rhetorical Analysis Paper
The short story Scholarship Boy by Richard Rodriguez, the author discusses the imbalance between his family life as well as his academics. His never-ending love for knowledge and under-educated family causes Richard to seek other ways and places to study. When Rodriguez was at a young age, he took the seat of the top of the class intellectual student but always felt like a bad student. With a high interest in learning, he started to spend more time with his books rather than his family. This caused him to become an outsider in his own family. Richard's Mexican immigrant family also was unable to help him with his homework because of their inability to understand what he is learning. Rodriguez was embarrassed by his parents’ lack of education and their accented voices and created a border between is at home and school lives. He later discovered that his forcefulness to separate school from home caused him to lose all sense of self but was eventually able to find the perfect balance. He uses a depiction of a scholarship boy from Richard Hoggart’s book The Uses of Literacy to relate to his old imbalanced self.
The author’s main purpose is to tell his fellow readers that studying is not everything that education is about. Your environment is also an important part of your educational growth. You cannot just ignore one area to focus on another as it is like rejecting parts of what has allowed you to grow to where you are now. Richard believes it is important to find the perfect balance between everything because knowledge is a lifelong journey with no true end. “advancing in his studies, the boy notices that his mother and father have not changed as much as he. Rather once he sees them, they often remind him of the person he once was and the life he earlier shared with them” (Rodriguez,28). Rodriguez, in the end, manages to balance his family and academic life after his strong education...