According to Adams, education should clear the obstacles away. Obstacles in Adams case are ego and lack of self-definition, which prevent the young men from creating their identity. Young men do not have the ability to judge themselves and see the deficiencies in their character. They are very good at analyzing Kant’s pieces or difficult Greek pieces, but they cannot apply the same attitude to themselves. Since young men do not criticize themselves, they do not have the opportunity to correct the deficiencies in their characters. They were in Harvard College and they were considered the best students in the world. They might know everything about any subject, however, they are ignorant about themselves. The reason for their ignorance is miseducation. According to Adams, the essential notion is that education should include awareness of identity. However, Adams’ education system fails to make students aware of their identities. Teachers did not direct students correctly. Teachers did not teach what they should have taught and students accepted what teachers told them rather than oppose them. Since education did not fulfill its duty, it became miseducation. Rodriguez agrees with Adams about the idea of awareness of the identity. Rodriguez defined education as a process of creating identity or acknowledging identity. He completed his education when he stopped fearing to desire his past. When he realized that his past is a part of his life, he starts to accept his real identity. According to him his identity was full of ignorance, and he needed to get rid of this ignorance. That is why he used to escape from his identity. However, when he came to the “end of education,” he acknowledged his identity. His family did not have to be educated. They did not have enough opportunity to receive a good education. However, his family’s situation did not prevent him from having a complete education.
Education completes its duty when it leads people to accept their identity rather than make them reach their academic aims. Academic aims satisfy people up to some point. A more important need in a person’s life is to integrate identity. Education’s role should be making the person achieve his need. However, since education in school fails to achieve this need, the person himself should take the responsibility for his own education at some point. Like Adams did, Rodriguez realized failure of his education and his responsibility for his own education years later. He states “To pass an examination, I copied down exactly what my teachers told me. It would require many more years of schooling (an inevitable miseducation)” (Richard Rodriguez, 580). He did whatever his teachers told him without even questioning them. Since he did not question and judge what they told him, he did not have a chance for improving himself and seeing the failure of his education. He realized years later that how the teachers and scholars whom he admired in the past are lonely and apart from their identities. “I was finally confident of membership in a ‘community of scholars’. But the pleasure that confidence gave me faded rapidly. After only two or three months in the reading room of the British Museum, it became clear that I had joined a lonely community” (Richard Rodriguez, 579). They were scholars because they spent their time reading and analyzing books, however, they did not have the ability to judge their identities. They are lonely in their worlds because being a scholar pushes them into a world full of books and makes them forget about themselves. They were so busy with their intellectual activities that they could not observe themselves. In Rodriguez’s education, obstacles were books too, which made him distant from himself. He kept reading all the time, which prevented him from being with his family. His family was a part of his identity that he had to live with. As he departed from his family, he became more and more distant from his identity. Since obstacles were not removed by his teachers, he could not see his situation at the earlier ages.
Books have different roles in Adams’ and Rodriguez’s lives. Adams used books in his college years as sources to reach identity and get rid of the ego. He learned history from the books and wrote about them. As he wrote, he discovered himself. He found the deficiencies in his character through reading and writing, and tried to recover them over years. His identity was not only the history of him but also the history of the world. Adams used books to learn and accept his identity.
However, Rodriguez used books to escape from his identity. By reading he was not only escaping from his identity but also creating himself a new identity. His identity consisted of his background and his life experiences. Since he came from an uneducated family, he did not have enough life experience about education before he started to go to school. School was a new world for him. When he started to go to school reading meant becoming like his teachers for him, which would have saved him from his identity and his origins. His parents were not well educated which prevented them from understanding him completely. However, what he wanted was to be understood by his family during his childhood as every child wants. During his childhood he decided that his family would never understand him and help him about his education. That is why he isolated himself from them, and he created a new world for himself in which there were his teachers but not his family. He thought his teachers would understand him since they were educated.
Rodriguez and Philips agree about escaping from identity through creating a new one, which Rodriguez tried to achieve through his books. Philips states, “If you want to be skillful at escaping you have to get yourself confined first” (Adam Philips, 497). If you find a way to hide yourself then you will have an opportunity to escape from your identity. You create a new world by staying away from your real one through hiding. Rodriguez’s way was to spend time with books. Rodriguez became very skillful at escaping since he confined by burying himself among books. He states, “Early on weekday mornings, I’d read in my bed. I’d feel a mysterious comfort then reading in the dawn quiet. I’d go to the library to read, surrounded by old men and women. Or if the weather was fine, I would take my books to the park and read in the shade of a tree” (Richard Rodriguez, 574).The only activity he did everywhere was to read. Reading took him to another world in which he felt at peace by being apart from his identity. Not only with reading but in the silence of reading he could create for himself a new world full of scholars, unlike his parents and his background. He could achieve the escape from his uneducated background and imagined himself in a educated world.
However, there is one major difference between Philips and Rodriguez. Philips says “to be unable to escape, is often linked to a sense of failure” (Adam Philips, 491). When a person cannot escape from the idea that bothers him, he feels a sense of failure. They feel stuck since they cannot leave their world. On the other hand, Rodriguez felt a real success at the moment he did quit escaping through books. According to him being unable to escape is not a failure but an achievement. However, during his childhood if he had been unable to escape, he would have felt a sense of failure since he was not aware of what he really wanted then. When he realized the loneliness of the scholars whom he admired before, he started to see the realities, “I realized that my special interests and skills united me to mere handful of academics. We formed an exclusive-eccentric! - society separated from other who would never care or be able to share our concerns” (Richard Rodriguez, 579). Being a scholar did not mean that they received a complete or true education. If a person whether he is a scholar or not, is still apart from himself or from others and he confines himself rather than facing the realities, then it means that he is miseducated.
Comparing Adams and Philips, Adams’ idea is the most useful for having the right education. He suggested facing one’s identity rather than escaping from it. Facing realities is the best way for us to be at peace and be in harmony with ourselves. Rodriguez felt both when he came back home after a while. Rodriguez says when he was living with his mother and father, he was “relieved by how easy it was to be home” (Richard Rodriguez, 580). He achieved this state through facing realities in his life rather than “trusting the silence of reading and having some experience rather than trusting the habit of abstracting from immediate experience” (Richard Rodriguez, 580). When he decided to look around by bringing his head out of the books, he started to experience his real world. Then he acknowledged his real identity. As Adams suggested, reaching self-definition by getting rid of the ego makes us see the past and question it but never ignore it. Man cannot ignore his past since it is part of him that he cannot escape from. However, it does not mean that we cannot improve ourselves by being stuck in the past. Our past is an element of our identity and it would improve us if we use it in an appropriate way. If we try to understand what happened in our past and try to integrate our past rather than escape from it or blame it like Rodriguez achieved the ability to do years later, then we will achieve true education.
Education, especially self-education, is an essential element for the formation of identity. Education does not reach an end unless the person takes the responsibility for his own education. Rodriguez and Adams took responsibility for their own education after a point, and they achieved true education. True education saves us from our ego and makes us accept real identity, as Adams tells us. On the other hand, miseducation fools us first and makes us escape from the truth. Through escaping from truth and identity, we create ourselves new fake worlds in which we imagine ourselves in a different reality, as Philips says. Rodriguez experiences both. He first escaped from his identity through his own method; reading. Then he realized that he did not want to live in the world he created. He achieved realization through seeing the truth by experiencing. His education ended when he accepted and acknowledged his identity.
Rodriguez, Richard. “The Achievement of Desire.” Ways of Reading. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2005. 562-81.
Adams, Henry. “The Education of Henry Adams.” Ways of Reading. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2005. 27-57.
Philips, Adams. “Houdini’s Box.” Ways of Reading. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Bedford/St.Martin’s, 2005. 485-509.
