Analysis Of Alfred Lubrano's Essay: The Shock Of Education

980 Words4 Pages
Rita Giordano was a working class college student who, chose to leave her district in order to get an education for herself. In his essay “The Shock of Education,” Alfred Lubrano shares the story of his friend Rita Giordano and her experience leaving her neighborhood to attend Syracuse University. Of this experience Rita explains, “I started feeling like, how do I coexist in these two worlds, college and home (Lubrano 585)?”Although Lubrano shows the college lifestyle as one that could be the reason why you lose your family while you move forward, he fails to include other examples such as work life and home life. The positive extent of attempting to negotiate the two worlds is that you will be educating yourself and you will be becoming more…show more content…
“Gradually, necessarily, the balance is lost…He takes his first step towards academic success, away from his family”(Rodriguez 600).Rodriguez seems to believe that attempting to balance the two parts of the student’s life was futile and not worth the effort. He believes that the student had to choose between his family and his schooling, being forced to lose one or the other. He doesn’t think that you can choose and balance both, although there are positives and negatives to attempting to have both. Positives of negotiating both worlds include getting an education and gaining experience as well as becoming successful. A student would be learning new information about a subject or the path that the student might want to take in the future. This would cause the student to become more successful by teaching them techniques they can use in their job field. They could do a job shadow that would give them experience for a job. In addition to the positives, there are also negatives to trying to balance…show more content…
This will occur because the student will want to be focused on school work and studying, neglecting their family. By neglecting their family, the student will grow apart from them and eventually lose them. They are also changing psychologically. Along with these is the fact that college is not cheap and if the student is working class, then, in order to afford it, they will take out a loan, causing them to be in debt. This is a big deal because if the student is going to a four-year school and they take out loans for all four years they will be hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. They won’t be able to pay it off for five or more years unless they got a high paying job and put most of the money towards paying off the loans and even then they would still be paying them off for a few years. Also, if the student tries to keep their family while being in school they could fall behind on homework and their grades will lower so their only choice is to disregard their family. Fortunately, there is a way to negotiate the two worlds and avoiding the negatives while including the

    More about Analysis Of Alfred Lubrano's Essay: The Shock Of Education

      Open Document