Cunningham Scene A person’s ability to put himself in another person’s place and understand why that person may act the way they do, shows one is able to be sympathetic and compassionate towards others. Atticus Finch, a father of two and a lawyer, explains to his daughter, Scout Finch, that “you never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view- until you climb into his skin and walk around in it” (Lee 30). She doesn 't understand the meaning of it all at first, but as she matures throughout the novel, she is exposed to the true meaning of Atticus’ words. In the novel To Kill A Mockingbird, Jean Louise tells Atticus about her first day of school, Mr.Finch tells her to try to think about things from the other person 's perspective—in this case, Miss Caroline. She, who was only trying to do her best in a strange place, and learning whose ways she didn’t yet understand. It started when a boy in Scout’s class, Walter Cunningham, had not brought lunch so Miss Caroline offers him a quarter to buy lunch, telling him that he can pay her back the next day. Not knowing that Walter’s family is large and poor, and that Walter will never be able to pay the teacher back or bring a lunch to school. “We could not hold her responsible when she knew no better,” (Lee 30) as Scout thought in her head. When Scout attempts to explain …show more content…
Throughout the novel, Atticus’s moral position of sympathy and understanding is differ with rigid, unbiased systems such as Miss Caroline’s, that fails to explain for individual needs. In this sense, Miss Caroline’s behavior in the schoolhouse foreshadows the courtroom scenes later in the novel, when the system that fails is not an educational technique but the