‘A child learns more from personal experience than by simply being told something.’ Discuss this idea, with reference to ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’. Children learn more from personal experience than by simply being told something. Whether it be pulling out the neighbors prize pansies or holding Freddie the fish out of the water for three minutes and seeing if he will survive, regardless of what parents or teachers say, children will generally go ahead and ignore the warning. Not so surprisingly, the consequences of these actions will be more likely to stick with them for a lot longer than by simply being told to leave Freddie alone. ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ is an excellent source of evidence for this debate.
Children are enthusiastic young individuals who take the world as their oyster. Their playground is a wonderland. But they are always wanting to push these boundaries to beyond the back fence and try new things, whether or not they be the best things for them. And regardless of us saying that jumping out of a tree will indeed bring them back to earth, all they have ever wanted to do was fly and, they are going to try, now. It is letting children learn from personal experience that gravity is as present as ever, that will maybe stop them from taking up sky diving in the future. All Scout and Jem Finch ever heard about Boo Radley was that he was a six foot tall crazed maniac with a huge skull, that sculled around May comb at night peering in peoples windows and that while calmly cutting up paper one night drove scissors into his fathers and twisted them right through, and then went on sanely cutting up more paper.
The Essay on Personal Experience 6
Few experiences in one’s lifetime have the capacity to transform. It takes an event of such immense magnitude to shake up ones’ frame of mind but when this occurs, one’s life never remains the same. Before the occurrence of such an event in my life, I was less concerned as the plight of refugees and I cared even less about the reasons behind their refugee status. However, I soon realized that ...
This, as imagined, triggered suspicions and a vivid imagination on the appearance and personality of Boo. And despite Atticus’s orders to leave Boo alone, nothing was to discourage Scout and Jem from sneaking into the Radley yard and prowling around. Scout and Jem’s curiosity finally got the better of them one day, when they actually saw Boo Radley. He was not, as they had been told, a menacing dragon in disguise, but simply a middle-aged man living a quiet existence.
This taught Scout and Jem not always to go on what they have been told, it was far better to find out for themselves the truth and that lesson stuck with them. Children do not want to be told the answers in life. They want to discover them. And letting them find out that the neighbor gets incredibly angry if they pull out her prize pansies and that Freddie the Fish will indeed decease to exist if they hold him out of water for 3 minutes, is a far better option, than simply telling them that that was not a very bright thing to do. To Kill a Mockingbird.
