To Kill a Mockingbird — Chapter 2

About This Passage

Harper Lee uses Atticus's quiet economic explanation to show the child-reader that Maycomb's poverty is a system, not an accident — farmers cannot pay doctors, doctors cannot pay lawyers, and men like Mr. Cunningham live balanced against their own mortgaged land. The passage teaches the young writer how a paragraph can explain an entire rural economy without raising its voice.

Narration Prompt

Retell Scout's first day of school, tracing how Miss Caroline's morning moves from the cat story, to the alphabet reading, to Walter Cunningham's refused quarter, to the ruler and the corner — and how each episode fails because Miss Caroline does not yet read Maycomb.

Discussion Questions

1. Miss Caroline's reading method is a handful of cards printed with the words 'the,' 'cat,' 'rat,' 'man,' and 'you,' and Scout calls the class's response 'impressionistic revelations in silence' — what is Harper Lee critiquing about the new pedagogy of the Dewey Decimal System?
2. When Scout tries to explain Walter Cunningham to Miss Caroline, she reports the fact that the Cunninghams 'never took anything they can't pay back — no church baskets and no scrip stamps' — what evidence in the chapter shows that Scout's account is accurate, and what does the accuracy cost her?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide