To Kill A Mockingbird Essays: Scout's First Day Of School

Josh Vu
Mr. Colombo
English 1H
2 February 2023 Scout’s First Day of School The novel, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, displays the successes and failures of the Maycomb school system through Scout’s first day of school. When the lunch period begins, Miss Caroline notices that Walter Cunningham neglects to bring a lunch. She hands him a quarter and requests that he repay her, but Scout’s confusion stems from the fact that Walter “did not forget his lunch, he did not have any” (Lee 22). The school’s indifference to Walter’s base level of physiological and safety needs, a school’s primary priority, leads to an apathetic treatment of schoolchildren. The school system concerns teaching only, rather than the holistic well-being of the student to thrive and succeed in a learning environment. The failure of the school system also shines through the example

One student explains that people like him “come the first day every year and then leave” and the truant lady “gets them here because she threatens them with the sheriff, but she gives up trying to hold them” (Lee 30). An important duty of the school is to teach, and the school system fails in this regard by failing to enforce beneficial education for students. The school is unable to accommodate school students outside of the normally lettered and academic system precisely because of their differences in their upbringing: a pragmatic, realistic, and hands-on approach of the working class versus a conceptual, imaginative, and creative approach of the academic class. The relenting of the school system enables students to break rules and learn that laws exist in name only. Throughout Maycomb County, Lee points to the injustices and failings of the school