Good morning/afternoon. I am here today to give my reasons why the book, To Kill a Mockingbird should be studied in all NSW secondary schools.
This book not only has an interesting storyline, but also has many morals and messages throughout the story that should be studied by our modern society to understand the hardships and trials that black people had to endure back in the 1930s.
The story is set in the American Deep South Town of Maycomb County in Alabama. Maycomb is a society that believes that the Negroes in the town are the only criminals and they should therefore be treated like one. As soon as the community hears about the arrest of Tom Robinson, they immediately come to the conclusion that he is guilty, even without any evidence. The town is a society of segregation, discrimination and prejudice, racism was an obvious and open issue; the white community hated Negroes, because they were not able to accept the cultural and traditional background the Negroes came from, the white community also judged the black community by the skin colour and appearance, not by the content of their character.
To Kill a Mockingbird is a story that revolves around the lives of many people and how each of them responds to the different obstacles in their lives.
Harper Lee writes the story so it is seen through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, to symbolise the innocence of a child’s mind and how they learn the attitudes towards different races as they begin to understand their own society in a wider view. They both become aware of the prejudice in their hometown and "learn to climb into other people's skin and walk around in it", as their father had told them. They both grow to realise how society places labels on people of different race and social status and how racism is rampant in their own town when it affects their own family. They also witness first hand that the world is unfair when their father defends a black man in court.
One of the main characters in this...