The Importance of Knowledge

A young man has just graduated college, and he’s trying to make money without having to get a job. As he surfs the web for ways to do this, he finds a website that claims that it will add money to your bank account as soon as you enter your credit card number and information. A few days later, he finds out that over $2,000 has been charged to that credit card without his knowledge. In today’s society, it’s not uncommon to hear about cases of fraud and identity theft as well as people going to jail for committing hate crimes. In the books To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, it is shown that it’s important to have knowledge about a situation before getting involved or making a judgement.

In the novel To Kill a Mockingbird, the majority of people living in Maycomb are quick to make judgements based on their beliefs and on what they have heard from other people. One person that seems to capture the interest of the community is Boo Radley. At the beginning of the book, Scout, Jem, and Dill spend most of their summer talking about and trying to meet Boo Radley. After another unsuccessful attempt at trying to see Boo, Atticus tells them that what Boo does is his own business and that “What [he does] might seem peculiar to [them], but it [does] not seem peculiar to him.” (Lee 65). The children’s interest in Boo Radley is caused by the rumors and stories they have heard from the rest of the town. They waste a lot of their time trying to see how strange he may be when in reality, he’s nearly as normal as anyone else living in Maycomb. In addition to Boo Radley, this book also focuses on the unfair treatment of Tom Robinson during the trial. Not only does the Robinson family get ...

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...A more specific example of how the Lacks family’s lack of knowledge (no pun intended) creates problems is Deborah’s interaction with Mr. Cofield. Cofield claims to be a lawyer who can help Deborah with the situation regarding her mother’s cells. It turns out that Cofield isn’t a doctor or a lawyer at all, and Rebecca states that “[he] had served years in various prisons for fraud.” (227). Deborah makes the mistake of allowing Cofield to have access to her mother’s records and making him her lawyer without knowing anything about him.

All in all, it’s important to get information about something unknown before getting into it. In these two books, although the situations may be different, there’s a common reasoning behind those situations. As James Thurber once said, “Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.” (www.brainyquote.com).