To Kill A Mockingbird Education Essay

In society, education is often only related to academic studies and things that can be acquired in institutions like schools and universities. This often results in people believing that education cannot be acquired through daily life and leaving moral education ignored. Particularly, in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, this is represented by the protagonist: a six-year-old, white, middle-to-high class, Alabaman named Jean Louise “Scout” Finch who sees the world the way children are “supposed” to. Scout does not receive much in the ways of academic education from school. In some parts, going to school even deterred Scout’s learning, as she was discouraged from continuing to read on a daily basis. Nevertheless, as she experiences many of

These topics that she learns about include, but aren’t limited to racism, empathy, and the role of women.

One of the main topics that Harper Lee brings up in To Kill A Mockingbird is racism, and one way she does this is by showing Scout’s intellectual growth and opinion on it. For example, in the earlier parts of the novel, Scout casually uses derogatory terms (like “nigger”) to refer to black people. One instance of this is when she tells Jem that she hasn’t ever “heard of a nigger snowman,” (Chapter 8, Page 89) because his snowman was very muddy. Although she only says this because of the racist Maycomb society she’s being raised in, it also shows how she unknowingly assumes blacks as lower without putting thought into it - it was just a given that blacks were below her because she was white. This all changes after Atticus teaches Scout that “nigger-lover is just one of those terms that don't mean anything ... ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody's favouring Negroes over and above themselves. It's slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody.”(Chapter 11, Page 144) This marks the point in which Scout begins to resist using “nigger” and getting into fights with the children who call her a “nigger-lover,” because she