The “scholarship boy”—lets translate it to “scholarship student” since this isn’t the 1970s anymore—is a student that becomes obsessive over academic success and becomes changed by this education obsession. They separate themselves from all distractions—mainly their family and the things they once loved. Richard Rodriguez illustrates his time as a scholarship student and how he found himself isolating himself in book, finding that he was distancing himself from his parents in favor of studying. He was distancing himself from his primary discourse—from his home and family and first learned behavior, in favor for a non-dominant secondary discourse.
The scholarship student is driven by success, the approval of superiors, and the knowledge they gain—social goods. However, because it is a secondary discourse, it’s hard to insert themselves into this space—they have to develop the body language, the values, and language associated to this new space. But, because it’s not their primary identity and discourse then it’s not going to be easy for them to conform. Rodriguez was forcing himself to read books he didn’t like because it was on some smart-sounding list and felt he would further understand the space he had sat himself in. He idolized his teachers and found himself trying to speak like them, mimicking them. It was all imitation and through that imitation he nurtured a secondary discourse that seemed to have overtook his primary one. He became so immersed into his secondary discourse that he forgot how to perform in his primary discourse. But, was his primary language truly replaced or was he just adding new behavior to his primary discourse?
In trying to support this thought, I stumbled upon a whole long paper written by Taylor Weeks, Understanding Discourse Transition. I only read a little bit of it because its 47 pages long and I’m not that crazy, but the gist of what Weeks is trying to propose in his paper is basically figuring out what Rodriguez and other scholarship students go through with their discourses. He questions “if a discourse can be changed slightly over time, is it the same discourse that person first learned as a child?” And he also asks, “if we do indeed change any small parts of our discourse over time, then can we replace the initial discourse we learned as children with a completely new discourse or has it become a strong dominant secondary discourse?” He decides to explore these questions by looking at military veterans and how their time in the military had affected them over time and how they interact once they are placed back into civilian life—specifically looking at how they adjust to college.
Throughout boot camp, a recruit’s initial discourse language begins to be replaced by a military discourse language. This military language is about sameness, about being indistinguishable from their peers appearance-wise, body language-wise, speech-wise, and so on. Once dropped into a different situation, a civilian situation, like a classroom, there is a difficulty to act within this discourse full of uniqueness. They don’t understand their place in this “new” world. This is like how education—a space that’s organized and quiet and full of logical—and then going home to a space full of disorganization, loudness, and more emotional. Even if the home space is what they grew up with, someone so enraptured by education has made their initial discourse language foreign to themselves. They can no longer function in that space the same way they did before. Weeks equates this process to baking cookies. “Depending on the recipe, you can make different cookies. Like a person’s discourse, we all learn at least one way to make cookies when we are children. As we develop our social language, we sometimes add things to our primary discourse. As with baking cookies, if we add any new element to our cookie recipe, we have changed our cookie recipe. No matter what we added to our cookie recipe, we will not make the same type of cookie that we learned how to make when we were children.”
Taylor Weeks’ Understanding Discourse Transition: https://scholarworks.uark.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=4000&context=etd
E367: Writing and Diversity 