Harper Lee dedicates 17 pages to Scout’s first day at school to help introduce many of Maycomb’s families and their backgrounds, through representatives in Scout’s class. She uses the teacher, Miss Caroline Fisher, to highlight the naivety and prejudice of many adults in the town of Maycomb. The author does not approve of the American education or the ‘Dewey Decimal System’, which she was forced to experience in her childhood, and uses the 17 pages of Scout’s first day at school to share her views on this.

Harper Lee is critical of the education system, she shows us through Scout’s reading and writing ability that it does not allow you to excel as it does not take into account ability or need: ‘Miss Caroline caught me writing and told me to tell my father to stop teaching me’. Here, in effect Miss Caroline is telling Scout to forget everything she has learnt before school and learn to read and write again in the ‘correct manor’ of the ‘Dewey Decimal System’.

At the beginning of the extract, Harper Lee emphasises Scout’s excitement on going to school, ‘I never looked forward more to anything in my life’. Harper Lee does this so that we empathize with Scout when she is disappointed with the way she is treated by Miss Caroline and turns upon a dramatic change: ‘If I didn’t have to stay, I’d leave’. The adult Scout looks back on episodes with her old teacher with satire, as she mocks her younger self’s naivety and Miss Caroline’s ridiculous teaching regime, where Scout is looked upon with ‘more than faint distaste’, just for outsmarting her classmates!

Harper Lee indicates to the reader that Miss Caroline’s mistakes could be due to her foreign background, she is from ‘Winstone County’ and Scout suggests that the region is ‘full of liquor interests, Big mules, steel companies…and other persons of no background’. However, rather than sympathizing Miss Caroline,