To Kill a Mocking Bird
Society has always wanted to believe moral education can change the world and by educating our children "correctly", one day we all might get along. Although these are reasonable and nice sounding thoughts, they will probably never come true. This is the message portrayed to me in the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird ,a well known book about a small opinionated town called Maycomb and a sister and brother named Scout and Jem. The two kids grow, with the community, experiencing and learning about racism and how to find who they are. Throughout the book I discovered with with these two characters, that the lessons and beliefs people learn as children, stick with them as they grow older, and are then passed down to future generations. Peoples opinions and views are hard to change when they have been ingrained in them by the people they love and trust.You can be educated by the teachers in schools not be racist and to be kind to others, but once you see or hear your family negatively speak to someone, you grow to accept their views as your own. From the very first chapters of the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird , Harper Lee made a point of showing how social morals are taught at home. I realized this the first time Scout started to edu
Changing the way you've grown up thinking is clearly difficult, as shown through the townspeople and the legend of Boo Radley. "Boo Radley", properly named Arthur Radley, was involved with a gang in his teen years. He was punished by his father which eventually turned him into a recluse. The town thought of him as a violent crazy man who should have been locked up in an insane asylum, but as the reader finds out in the book, these rumors are not true. They were legends kids made up to scare each other. Boo chooses not to come out into the world until the end of the book. He knew people would have had a hard time accepting all the vicious rumors to be false, and staying inside, minding his own business, would be easier than facing the towns harsh judgment. He hoped they would eventually find out he was a normal human who chose not to be a part of the racist world. Like everything else in the town though, change and acceptance would take a long time. Regardless of the fact that Maycomb was a stubborn community set in it's own ways, it does not mean the town stayed the same without any change. Atticus, in the Robinson vs Ewell trial, was Tom Robinson's lawyer, which caused a town controversy. During the trial, although people shunned him and his family, he kept his head up, which deep down people truly admired. As a result of the families not changing the way they think over long periods of time, the town is very slow moving and has a hard time adjusting to small and large changes.The perfect example of this is the Tom Robinson trial. The trial of Tom Robinson consisted of Mayella Ewell, the eldest of the Ewell family children, accusing a black man,Tom Robinson, of "taking advantage of her". In Maycomb, the trial was historic news. The case was shocking to the town, and the residents of Maycomb did not know what to think. If the town had been more welcoming to change, the families might have learned from the trial and have seen how racist they were. However, because they didn't understand the deeper meaning of the trial, and were stuck in the old beliefs they had been taught as kids, they ended up convicting an innocent man. A quote by Dolphus Raymond, the "drunk" , clarifies the towns ignorance. Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960, with the hope racism would be banished. However, in the year 2001, we still haven't figured out how to educate people to accept differences of any kind. The fact remains there will always be a handful of people who will disagree with the rest of the world and who will fear change of what they think is right. Unfortunately, those people will then pass down their negative and narrow view
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1789
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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