Huckleberry Finn and The Modern Classroom :: essays papers

Huckleberry Finn and The Modern Classroom Mark Twain’s story The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a racist, immoral book that should not be taught in American High Schools. As a children’s story, Finn is an exciting tale of a boy and a runaway slave riding a raft to freedom. As a book to be taught to 16-year-old English students, it is a novel that incorporates serious racist issues conveniently hidden among it’s many scattered plots. From the beginning we are warned â€Å"persons attempting to find a plot will be shot,†(Notice) suggesting that, as analyzing novels is a central theme in English classrooms, Finn may not be the best choice. The protagonist, Huckleberry Finn, is a 14-year-old white boy growing up in Missouri, who lives his life running away from his problems, lying to everyone, stealing, and using everyone he comes across. He fakes his own death very convincingly, and all with the cool, level-headedness not akin to young boys. â€Å"Well, next I took an old sack and put a lot of big rocks in it, -all I could drag,-and I started it from the pig and dragged it to the door and through the woods down to the river and dumped it in, and down it sunk, out of sight. You could easy see that something had been dragged over the ground. I did wish Tom Sawyer was there, I knowed he would take an interest in this kind of business, and throw in the fancy touches. Nobody could spread himself like Tom Sawyer in such a thing as that.†(Ch. 7) This character isn’t probably what the youth of America needs to be learning about. His ability to remorselessly lie to people to get what he wants, is a frightening characteristic, which isn’t one that should be taught to impressionable students. He has taken the pretense of his own death and, in his mine, placed it in the category of the imaginary robbers and thieves games he used to play with Tom Sawyer. Huck’s companion on his trip down the river is Jim, an uneducated adult, black slave who has run away hoping to make it to a free state. The way that Huck treats Jim at times, lying to him or belittling him is racist and wrong.