Often, a person’s response to another’s action is to judge them without a thought. Most people do not understand the right way to deal with an action that they disagree on. In the book, To Kill a Mockingbird (TKM), Scout does this, and her father tells her, “...Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view.” There were two main reasons for her father, Atticus, telling her this.
The first reason for Atticus to make this statement is to teach Scout not to judge people based on what they do, even if she disagrees with it. Scout shows signs of doing this in TKM, when “Walter poured syrup on his vegetables and meat with a generous hand.” Scout asks “what the sam hill he was doing” and he immediately puts his hands in his lap and ducks his head. This shows that Scout judged Walter because she wasn’t used to people pouring so much syrup on their food. This also shows that if Scout had heard Atticus’ statement before this happens she probably wouldn’t have said anything to Walter, realizing that he was poor, and had never eaten syrup before. Atticus’ statement was very impactful towards Scout in another way, though.
The second reason that Atticus tells Scout about understanding people is because he wanted her to get along with other people. For example, Scout learns that if she had put herself in Miss Caroline’s shoes, she would realize that “it was an honest mistake on her [Miss Caroline’s] part” to hand something to a Cunningham. This shows that Scout now knows that sometimes people will make mistakes that they can’t help, and that one shouldn’t hold them responsible for it. This also shows that to make friends with people, one has to accept another for whom they are. Without Atticus’ conveying all of this to Scout, she would not know how to get through life on her own.
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