The first two chapters of Harper Lee's To Kill a
Mockingbird contain masterfully controlled humor beginning with Miss
Caroline's ironic instructions to Scout to inform her father not to teach her
any more as it would interfere with Scout's learning
because he does not know how to teach.
When Scout informs
Jem of the incidents of her day, Jem says,
"I'm just trying to tell you the new way they're
teachin' the first grade, stubborn. It's the Dewey Decimal
System."
Of course Jem's
malaproprism is humorous of itself. For, by alluding to the Dewey Decimal System, Jem
has mistakenly confused the proprietary system of classification for public libraries
begun by Melvil Dewey with the theories of the American philosopher and the foremost
educator of his day, John Dewey. And, since John Dewey believed that students should be
involved in real life tasks and challenges, it is also humorous that Miss Caroline
accuses Scout's father of not knowing how to teach when it is really Atticus, not Miss
Caroline, who follows the precepts of Dewey's idea of education as he has Scout reading
the Mobile Register, an action that is a real life task, while it
is Miss Caroline who reads the imaginative story about personified cats that has no
relationship to real life at all to children "who have picked cotton and fed hogs from
the time they could walk," as Scout notes.
No comments:
Post a Comment