What important lessons do the children learn in Part I of 'To Kill a Mockingbird'? The book 'To Kill a Mockingbird', was written by Harper Lee in 1960

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What important lessons do the children learn in Part I of ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’?

The book ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’, was written by Harper Lee in 1960, and was based on her previous experiences as a child. She was a tomboy as a child and was friends with Truman Capote, who later provided a base for the character of Dill. When she was five years old, a trial began accusing nine black men raping two white women. Although medical evidence proved the women had not been raped, the men were still found guilty. Fortunately all but one of them were freed or paroled, and this case left a deep impression on Lee, later using it as an outline for the novel ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’.

        The novel was set in the American South in the early 1930’s, when the issues that had been fought over in the American Civil War were still present in the South. This was the treatment of black people, because the South had believed that they were to be kept as slaves but the North disagreed. When the North won, the South still were prejudiced towards them. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ is set in the Southern state of Alabama, in a fictitious place called Maycomb. There was a lot of prejudice here, mostly racial, although some white people treated black people with the respect they deserved.

        The novel is written through the eyes of a young girl called Scout, who grows up in Maycomb County, with her brother Jem and their friend Dill. This allows us to gain an understanding of the innocence of childhood and how the perception of a situation through the eyes of a child can differ from that of an adult. The way that the book has been written also lets us into the thoughts of a child as she is learning important lessons in life. The way that I am writing this essay will look through the different areas of life that Scout, Jem and Dill learns lessons in.

The book begins in summer, a few weeks before Scout id due to start school. We learn that she is very excited to start school when she says:

        “I never looked forward more to anything in my life. Hours of wintertime had         found me in the tree-house looking over at the school yard, spying on         multitudes of children…I longed to join them.”

However, on her first morning she realises that when Jem says “school’s different” he was right. Firstly, she has been warned by Jem, who is quite happy to play with her out of school, to leave him alone while they are there. He is also reluctant to take her to school and only agrees when he gets paid but he has done things for her happily in the past. When Scout arrives at school she realises that it does not live up to her expectations. Her class have a new, young teacher, Miss Caroline, who came from North Alabama and had been taught a new way of teaching at college which Jem referred to as the ‘Dewey Decimal System’, although this is the way in which books are catalogued in libraries. This new system involved holding up ‘flashcards’ with words and pictures on them so that the class could learn what things were called. Miss Caroline also read a story about cats that can talk. Miss Caroline thinks that this will be interesting for the children but Scout realises that none of them liked it, having ‘chopped cotton and fed hogs fro the time they were able to walk’, so did not really need this sort of story to be told to them as it could not help them in any way. Scout is told off for being able to read and write and Miss Caroline wants her to tell Atticus not to teach her anymore, saying “I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage”. It was a good thing that Scout could read and write, but Miss Caroline does not think so. This was because she wanted to teach all the children the same and did not take their personalities or backgrounds into account when teaching them and treats them all on the same level. However, they are not because some of the children had already been in this grade and some of them had been taught nothing at all, so they needed to start off at different points. When Miss Caroline is holding up flashcards, Scout says ‘I was bored, so began a letter to Dill.’ She realises that this teaching will not help her. Miss Caroline also does not understand about the different families and their morals, like when Miss Caroline tries to give Walter Cunningham some money for his lunch, Scout says, “…you’ll get to know all the country folks after a while. The Cunninghams never took anything they can’t pay back”. Scout realises that Miss Caroline is new to the county so does not know the ways of everyone here. Scout has been brought up by her father Atticus, who is very fair minded and treats everybody as individuals, so Scout acts like this too. When Scout starts second grade, they still do not read and write and the routine is still the same with the flashcards. The main lessons Scout learns from school are that not everybody treats everyone as individuals because they do not understand the ways in which different people have been brought up.

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The children learn several ways in which they need to be tolerant to others. Scout learns that she needs to understand why other people do things. After her first day at school she was angry with Miss Caroline because when Scout had to explain about the Cunninghams not taking things that they couldn’t pay back Miss Caroline got annoyed with her. Atticus says that:

        ‘We could not expect her to learn all Maycomb’s ways in one day, and could         not hold her responsible when she knew no better.’

She had not grown up in Maycomb, so was not accustomed ...

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