The stereotypical good student, the scholarship student, is academically successful, motivated by the praise and attention he or she receives from their teacher. While this student is the archetype of perfection for a teacher, he or she suffers, what Rodriguez coins as a “consequent price- the loss,” for their academic achievement (535). No longer can the scholarship student mingle his home and school life, instead each category falls into its own private sphere, with academics taking the forefront in the student’s life. For the student, school is home to an air of intellectualism that home lacks, and in order to fully submerse oneself into this environment the other must be cast off (536). For Rodriguez, he found himself in this category of “scholarship boy” easily. He struggled to gain help from his working class, uneducated parents on homework, and he felt isolated from his family because they could not comprehend, to the level he wanted them to, his love of reading. As time continued, he found himself drawn more towards his teachers. To Rodriguez, his teachers were his idols, and everything he did was in a way to emulate them. At one point in his essay he laments about the discussion between his father and teacher stating, “. . . felt ashamed of his labored, accented words. . . my teacher was so soft spoken and her words were edged sharp and clean” (538). The lack of his parents education makes Rodriguez feel as though he does not have a proper place in the school, his teachers know everything that his parents do not know. The uncertainty of the scholarship boy is what is most dangerous to this student because, like Alan Lovell states, “Mr. Hoggart’s scholarship boy is an outsider” (33). Lovell recounts his experience of, as he states, being thrust into this “new world of culture”, an uncharted territory where for him
The stereotypical good student, the scholarship student, is academically successful, motivated by the praise and attention he or she receives from their teacher. While this student is the archetype of perfection for a teacher, he or she suffers, what Rodriguez coins as a “consequent price- the loss,” for their academic achievement (535). No longer can the scholarship student mingle his home and school life, instead each category falls into its own private sphere, with academics taking the forefront in the student’s life. For the student, school is home to an air of intellectualism that home lacks, and in order to fully submerse oneself into this environment the other must be cast off (536). For Rodriguez, he found himself in this category of “scholarship boy” easily. He struggled to gain help from his working class, uneducated parents on homework, and he felt isolated from his family because they could not comprehend, to the level he wanted them to, his love of reading. As time continued, he found himself drawn more towards his teachers. To Rodriguez, his teachers were his idols, and everything he did was in a way to emulate them. At one point in his essay he laments about the discussion between his father and teacher stating, “. . . felt ashamed of his labored, accented words. . . my teacher was so soft spoken and her words were edged sharp and clean” (538). The lack of his parents education makes Rodriguez feel as though he does not have a proper place in the school, his teachers know everything that his parents do not know. The uncertainty of the scholarship boy is what is most dangerous to this student because, like Alan Lovell states, “Mr. Hoggart’s scholarship boy is an outsider” (33). Lovell recounts his experience of, as he states, being thrust into this “new world of culture”, an uncharted territory where for him