All or Nothing

All Or Nothing

“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 life I enjoyed before becoming a student.”

- Richard Rodriquez

The way that I have been raised, the idea that family and education are the most important things in life has been drilled into my head since birth. Two worlds both equipped with the tools you need to get through life. Most of us are okay with this slight separation between family and education. We go to school, work hard and then come home to our family, always walking the fine line between one world and the other. But what happens to a child when they are forced to choose? What happens when it’s all or nothing?

A child is born into a family with parents that are uneducated. He grows, becomes a young man, and goes to school. He is intelligent, has a drive for learning and the desire to achieve what he wants. But there is a pressure that is pushing down on him. His family, for fear of losing

their son to the unknown, is straying him away from this whole new world of education.

All this boy has ever known is wrapped up in his family and he is ready to go out and seek a higher education. He is leaving the known for the unknown. The known is the routine, everyday life, the family and friends, the neighborhood, and the job he has. The unknown is every thing else. It is the doors that education would open up for him.

Education is a whole new world, but it is a world that the parents or the family have never been to or have never been encouraged to go. They don’t see the benefits that it can bring to their son and them. They are blinded and cannot let their son go away from them. They fear that he will find something better and forget them or that he will find something better and look down on them. So to keep their son close to their side they put pressure on the boy’s shoulders. They talk and implant doubt into his mind. He begins to wonder, “Maybe they are right. Maybe I can’t do it.” “This life has been good for all of them, why should I go out and pursue this? Who do I think I am?”

Once the son begins to let these thoughts into his mind he looses the desire slowly until he feels there is no need for education any more. He begins to suppress his intelligence and replaces it with ignorance in order to fill the separation between him and his family from before.

There have been times where I have felt this kind of pressure. Pressure to stay close to the family, not go astray or venture out. It’s a sense of security. The family tries to pull you closer every time you step out the line so that they can keep the family in tact and secure your love and care to them.

The main idea of Rodriguez's essay is that he had to be changed to be truly educated. This message is also in one of Freire's essays as well, but the changes the authors propose are completely inconsistent and contradictory, with Freire promoting a transformation that leads a person closer to humanity and Rodriguez promoting the opposite, a transformation that leads a person farther away from their humanity. By the end of Rodriguez's essay, he seems to firmly believe that "education finally had given ways of speaking and caring" about the fact that