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The remainder of my schooldays were no more auspicious than the first.
Indeed, they were an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in
which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the
State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group
Dynamics. What Jem called the Dewey Decimal System was school-wide
by the end of my first year, so I had no chance to compare it with other
teaching techniques. I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle,
who went to school at home, knew everything- at least, what one didn't
know the other did. Furthermore, I couldn't help noticing that my father had
served for years in the state legislature, elected each time without
opposition, innocent of the adjustments my teachers thought essential to the
development of Good Citizenship. Jem, educated on a half-Decimal half
Duncecap basis, seemed to function effectively alone or in a group, but Jem
was a poor example: no tutorial system devised by man could have stopped
him from getting at books. As for me, I knew nothing except what I
gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on
at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb
County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was
being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not
believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state
had in mind for me.
As the year passed, released from school thirty minutes before Jem, who
had to stay until three o'clock, I ran by the Radley Place as fast as I could,
not stopping until I reached
the safety of our front porch. One afternoon as I raced by, something caught
my eye and caught it in such a way that I took a deep breath, a long look
around, and went back.