In one of America’s most popular novels, seven-year-old Scout has been reading "ever since she was born.” She and her father read the newspapers together every evening. Late in the summer, she realized she would be starting school in a week. “I never looked forward more to anything in my life. Hours of wintertime had found me in the treehouse, looking over at the schoolyard, spying on the children there…I longed to join them…”

But everything changed by lunchtime! Scout’s older brother Jem asked how she was getting along on her first day of school. "I told him. If I didn’t have to stay I’d leave. Jem, that damn lady says Atticus’s been teaching me to read and for him to stop it.”

What could have happened between breakfast and lunch so horrible that Scout’s eager enthusiasm was crushed?

That evening Atticus asked, “Something wrong, Scout?” She told her father she “didn’t feel very well and didn’t think she’d go to school any more if it was all right with him.”

Why did Scout want to stay home? Essentially for the same reasons that absenteeism is now at epidemic levels throughout the country. Schools don't respect their students, and don't respect the subjects being taught.

“Don’t worry, Scout,” Jem comforted me. “Our teacher says Miss Caroline’s introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college. [The story is set circa 1935.] It’ll be in all the grades soon. You don’t have to learn much out of books that way— it’s like if you wanta learn about cows, you go milk one, see?” Scout points out she is not concerned with cows.

“I suppose [Miss Caroline] chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me anymore, it would interfere with my reading…

“Miss Caroline apparently thought I was lying. ‘Let’s not let our imaginations run away with us, dear,’ she said. ‘Now you tell your father not to teach you anymore. It’s best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I’ll take over from here and try to undo the damage.’ ”

“Ma’am?”

“Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.” I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers.”

Scout’s brother said, “I’m just trying to tell you the new way they’re teachin’ the first grade, stubborn. It’s the Dewey Decimal System.”

(We should probably assume that Harper Lee, a great writer and very smart, knew that the Dewey Decimal System is how librarians categorize their books. Harper was also tough and sly. She was saying that our schools know as much about education as brother Jem knew.)

“Having never questioned Jem’s pronouncements, I saw no reason to begin now. The Dewey Decimal System consisted, in part, of Miss Caroline waving cards at us on which were printed THE, CAT, RAT, MAN and YOU …I was bored, so I began a letter to Dill. Miss Caroline caught me writing and told me to tell my father to stop teaching me. ‘Besides,’ she said. 'We don’t write in the first grade, we print. You won’t learn to write until you’re in the third grade.’ ”

Little cards with one-syllable words printed on them is the essence of learning to read with sight-words. This is how the Education Establishment destroyed the widespread literacy we had achieved before 1920. Today, the media report that half the young people cannot read, not in the full sense of the word. They guess a great deal, agonize a great deal, and skip ahead a great deal. They are tense and unhappy. They hate to read. More exactly, they hate trying and failing.

Here is the most exquisite part. The nightingale is a gifted mimic, a beloved bird that is mentioned in many songs, such as one I grew up with:

Bo Diddley, Bo Diddley, have you heard

Mama gonna buy you a mockingbird?

Killing a mockingbird is regarded as an evil act and the subplots of the novel deal with killing symbolic mockingbirds, that is, the weak and defenseless characters in the story.

But the bigger story is a school system that is killing millions of mockingbirds, if you count killing the spirit of children so they drag half-crippled through the rest of their lives. And we now have 50 million of these wounded birds.

To Kill A Mockingbird is probably the most assigned novel in our K-12 system. The irony never stops. Millions of students are ordered to study something that they have been inoculated against.

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To understand what went wrong in our schools, read “Saving K–12” by Bruce Deitrick Price. (His new novel is The Boy Who Saves the World (suspense, crime, A.I., romance). See Lit4u.com for info on Price’s books.