Richard Rodriguez leaves the warm, sensual, intimacy of his Spanish home life to become a consumer of the American public school ethos and laments what he has left behind. Twain and Rodriguez do not ask us to stay at home, live in narrow worlds, but each laments what has been lost in their quest. An awareness of ethics begins with a sense of loss, an admission that we have given up something of value, that there is a cost to being a lawyer. We learn how ethics works when we realize the price that we pay for what we have become, what we have given up, what has been lost along the way. The radical dichotomy between these two language worlds, the private world of Spanish and the public world of English, is a stark one.
Lavish emotions texture home life.
Then, at school the instruction bids him to trust lonely reason primarily. Immediate needs set the pace of his parents' lives. From his mother and father the boy learns to trust spontaneity and nonrational ways of knowing. Then, at school, there is mental calm. Teachers emphasize the value of a reflectiveness that opens a space between thinking and immediate action.