The Significance of Learning Empathy for Democratic Education in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

This study explores the ways that American institutional and cultural education has been depicted in the literature of the early twentieth century. It questions the degree to which education in the United States actually engenders the critical and creative thinking necessary for democratic citizenship and shared power. A true democratic education is an education of emancipation; however, the ‘othering’ of race, class, and gender often prevent emancipatory education from occurring. The prominence of the issues of emancipation and indoctrination in twentieth century novels suggests that the same paradoxes about education and democracy exist. This study traces the tensions of emancipation and indoctrination from both institutions and culture in Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. It concludes that the protagonists in these novels, much like most people encountered in our schools and streets, have the ability to emancipate themselves from the ‘othering’ and ideologies in our culture. However, many of our institutions and societal assumptions continue to indoctrinate persons into the hierarchical system. Through these two novels, Lee and McCullers strongly suggest that learning empathy should be the only way to transcends the boundaries of prejudice and hate which our society and culture make.