What Is Jem Finch Learned In To Kill A Mockingbird

“...if you can stand in Bob Ewell's shoes a minute, I destroyed his last shred of credibility at that trial, if he had any to begin with. The man had to have some kind of comeback, his kind always does....He had to take it out on somebody....You understand?” Atticus, the attorney father of Scout and Jem Finch, tells his children to think about others are experiencing life. This is one of the major lessons in the novel, To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee. To Kill A Mockingbird is about courage, prejudice, innocence, and knowledge. The book takes place during the Great Depression, in the tired old town of Maycomb, Alabama. The book is told by a little girl named Scout Finch. Her father, Atticus Finch, is an attorney who happens to be defending
an innocent black man in a rape case. Over the course of To Kill A Mockingbird, both of the characters, Jem and Scout come of age and learn to put themselves in another person's shoes.

At the start of the book, Jem and Scout have a normal, brother-sister relationship.
But, at some points, Jem would act like a child throwing a tantrum. For instance, while the children are walking by Mrs. Dubose’s house, Mrs. Dubose yells at the children, saying, "Your father's no better than the niggers and trash he works for!." This causes Jem to lose his temper,which leads to the first major fight between Scout and Jem. Jem grabs Scout’s baton, which he just bought for her, and uses it to destroy all of Mrs. Dubose's camellias. He then breaks the baton in two while Scout screams at him to stop. Jem then shows his anger on Scout, yanking her hair, kicking her, making her fall flat on her face, picking her up roughly and dragging her away from Mrs. Dubose’s house. He later is forced to work for Mrs. Dubose so he can “repay” her for destroying her flowers. Jem learns that Mrs. Dubose was a morphine addict, and she was slowly stopping the use of morphine, causing her to have sudden outbreaks of anger. He learns that the only reason Atticus wanted him to work for Mrs. Dubose was so that he could help keep her mind off of things. Jem puts himself in Mrs. Dubose’s shoes, thus, resulting in him learning to appreciate Mrs.
Dubose.

Another coming of age moment is when Scout comes home upset about her first day of first grade.
She attempts to make Miss. Caroline, her teacher like her, but she had failed. Atticus comforts her by telling her “if you can learn a simple trick, 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…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Scout at first, attempts to do so but does not succeed. At the end of the book, while Scout stands on the Radley’s front porch, she puts herself in Boo’s shoes. She realizes that Boo was never a phantom, nor was he the demon Jim described him to be. She realizes that Boo is a person with a kind heart who just happens to be different. She remembers Atticus’s lesson too, she states, “Atticus was right. One time he said you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around in them. Just standing on the Radley porch was
enough.”
Both of the characters, Jem and Scout come of age and both learn how to see the world through another person's eyes. Jem learns his lesson with the help of Mrs. Dubose while learns hers by herself. Jem and Scout were both once naive, but the events in life thought them to “climb into” someone else's skin “and walk around in it.” At the end of the book, Scout says “Jem and I would get grown but there wasn’t much else left for us to learn except possibly algebra.”