Irony in To Kill A Mockingbird

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“Two of the major ironies of the book are that justice is not done in court, and very little education takes place in the classroom.” By detailed reference to events in court and school, show how far you agree with this statement.

I agree to quite an extent with the above statement. In order to create a scenario where the reader is able to fully comprehend the true extent of the situation in the setting, Harper Lee has made use of irony. Irony is shown throughout the novel and instead of directly influencing the reader, subtly injects itself into the subconscience of the reader, giving the reader something to remember and ponder upon. The two major situations where irony is portrayed are in school and in court.

Early on in the novel, we can see that Scout’s teacher, Miss Caroline, is actually mortified that Scout can already read and write. This is because Miss Caroline is following a pre-determined lesson plan, which was set on the assumption that the children did not know how to read or write. Scout is therefore shown to be different and out of the ordinary, which was shocking for Miss Caroline, who appears to have been instructed to teach following a rigid and inflexible course outline. In order to make Scout adapt to her lesson plan, Miss Caroline expects her to stop reading and writing at home now that she is in school. She tells Scout that she must stop learning at home from her father, and instead start off with a “fresh mind”. This represents a discouragement, rather than encouragement, of education, which rather ironically comes from a teacher. This introduces the reader to the expectation that very little education will take place in the classroom, as Scout already knows more than she is supposed to.

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To further exaggerate the irony of education in the 1930’s, Harper Lee also includes the introduction of the Dewey Decimal System to Scout at the beginning. The Dewey Decimal System was designed to have an emphasis on “active learning”, but is shown to have failed its primary intention. The teaching method, which involved Miss Caroline waving off cards which had words such as “cat”, “rat” and “man” at her students, was extremely passive, which is exemplified in the novel when the students hardly do anything at all. They become extremely bored in the end, which would be quite the ...

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