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To
kill a Mockingbird Summary: Chapter 4
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School continues; the year goes by. Scout doubts that the new educational system
is really doing her any good - she finds school boring and wishes the teacher
would allow her to read and write, rather than ask the children to do silly
activities geared toward "Group Dynamics" and "Good Citizenship."
One afternoon as she runs past the Radley house she notices something in the
knot-hole of one of the oak trees in the Radleys' front yard. It turns out to
be two pieces of chewing gum. Scout is careful but she eventually decides to
chew them. Jem makes her spit it out. Later, toward the end of the school year,
they find in the same place a little box with two polished Indian-head pennies
inside - these are good luck tokens. They aren't sure whether these have been
left for them, but decide to take them anyway.
Dill comes to Maycomb for the summer again, full of stories about train rides
and his father, whom he claims to have finally laid eyes upon. The three try
to start a few games, but they quickly get bored. Jem pushes Scout inside an
old tire, but it ends up in the Radleys' yard. Terrified, Scout runs back, but
Jem has to run into the yard and retrieve the tire. Dill thinks Boo Radley died
and Jem says they stuffed his body up the chimney. Scout thinks maybe he's still
alive. They invent a new game about Boo Radley. Jem plays Boo, Dill plays Mr.
Radley, and Scout plays Mrs. Radley. They polish it up over the summer into
a little dramatic reenactment of all the gossip they've heard about Boo and
his family, including a scene using Calpurnia's scissors as a prop. One day
Atticus catches them playing the game and asks them if it has anything to do
with the Radleys. They say it doesn't, and Atticus replies, "I hope it
doesn't." Atticus's sternness forces them to stop playing, and Scout is
relieved because she's worried for another reason: she thought she heard the
sound of someone laughing inside the Radley house when her tire rolled into
their yard.
Analysis
The schools have attempted to teach children how to behave in groups and how
to be upstanding citizens, but Scout notes that her father and Jem learned these
traits without the kind of schooling she is getting. The school may be attempting
to turn the children into moral beings, but Scout's moral education happens
almost exclusively in her home or in the presence of Maycomb adults and friends.
This suggests that schools can only provide limited change in children's moral
sensibility, or no change at all - families and communities are the true sculptors
of children's sense of what is right and good, and what is not.
Accepting gifts in the Radleys' tree and rolling accidentally into the Radleys'
yard are some of the first signs that the children are slowly coming closer
to making contact with Boo, coming a little closer to knowing him with each
event. They're still terrified, however, by the mystery that Boo presents. Their
curiosity and the creation of their drama shows how desperately they wanted
to find answers to their questions about Boo in the absence of any real information
or knowledge. His strangeness leaves them wanting to know more and more, and
the creation of stories occurs partially out of their curiosity and desire to
shed light on something strange. Likewise, the townspeople have a tendency to
react disfavorably to things that are "different" until they have
reasons to understand the difference. This explains why Mr. Dolphus Raymond,
in Chapter 20, lets the town think that he is drunk even though he is really
just doing things in his own way. However, the children are gradually humanizing
Boo - he was referred to in the opening chapter as a "malevolent phantom,"
but by this point he is a real man whose antisocial behavior marks him as unusual
and therefore suspicious or dangerous.
