Hunger of Memory: Chapter 2

And each time I ask a question, she jerks up and down in her desk like a marionette, while her hand waves over the bowed heads of her classmates.

The night my father tried to help me with an arithmetic exercise, he kept reading the instructions, each time more deliberately, until I pried the textbook out of his hands, saying, ‘I’ll try to figure it out some more by myself.’

I became more tactful, careful to keep separate the two very different worlds of my day.

I became bookish, puzzling to all my family.

From a very early age, I understood enough, just enough about my classroom experiences to keep what I knew repressed, hidden beneath layers of embarrassment.

He will have, probably unconsciously, to oppose the ethos of the hearth, the intense gregariousness of the working-class family group.

The child is ‘moderately endowed,’ intellectually mediocre, Hoggart supposes—though it may be more pertinent to note the special qualities of temperament in the child.

And to evade nostalgia for the life he has lost, he concentrates on the benefits education will bestow upon him.

The docile, obedient student came home a shrill and precocious son who insisted on correcting and teaching his parents with the remark: ‘My teacher told us....’

Shyly I’d smile, never betraying my sense of the irony: I was not proud of my mother and father.

But I never tried to explain that it was not the occupation of teaching I yearned for as much as it was something more elusive: I wanted to be like my teachers, to possess their knowledge, to assume their authority, their confidence, even to assume a teacher’s persona.

In Mexico, orphaned when he was eight, my father left school to work as an ‘apprentice’ for an uncle.

Shortly after, remedial reading classes were arranged for me with a very old nun.

Re-reading these brief moralistic appraisals usually left me disheartened.

I vacuumed books for epigrams, scraps of information, ideas, themes—anything to fill the hollow within me and make me feel educated.

There may be some things about him that recall his beginnings—his shabby clothes; his persistent poverty; or his dark skin (in those cases when it symbolizes his parents’ disadvantaged condition)—but they only make clear how far he has moved from his past.

Coming from him those sounds seem suddenly odd. Odd too is the effect produced when he uses academic jargon—bubbles at the tip of his tongue

Instead, one hears proposals for increasing the self-esteem of students and encouraging early intellectual independence.

Radical educationists meanwhile complain that ghetto schools ‘oppress’ students by trying to mold them, stifling native characteristics.

From the story of the scholarship boy there is no specific pedagogy to glean.

His story makes clear that education is a long, unglamorous, even demeaning process—a nurturing never natural to the person one was before one entered a classroom.

At once different from most other students, the scholarship boy is also the archetypal ‘good student.’

Around me each day were dour faces eclipsed by large piles of books.

I felt drawn by professionalism to the edge of sterility, capable of no more than pedantic, lifeless, unassailable prose.

I grew to hate the growing pages of my dissertation on genre and Renaissance literature.