The Lesson :: Analysis, Toni Cade Bambara

Throughout history knowledge, culture and schooling has been passed down within communities. Life lesson were often taught by older, wiser or officially educated people within the community. This idea still holds true today, especially in low-income communities as illustrated in the short story The Lesson by Toni Cade Bambara. I am led to believe that story took place in a low-income community in the early to mid-sixties as African-American families travel to find better opportunities, when extended families moved north as groups and then spreading out into their respective community (507). Miss Moore, who had obtained a college education, fictional this role within her community by saying it was only proper(a) that she should take responsibility for the young ones education (507). ab initio the lesson of the day was the value of capital, but quickly evolved into several different lessons for the children in attendance that day.Miss Moore begins her lesson by planting a seed i n the minds of the children in the form of small talk such as what things cost, how a good deal their parents made, how some(prenominal) they spent on rent and how money was not carve up up right in this country (508). This got the children thinking about the money that ordinary people within their community spent on effortless survival. Their field trip brings them to a fancy Fifth Avenue play broth F.A.O Schwartz (512), where they admire toys form the window. The children begin to notice the outlandish prices that the toys were cosmos sold for, which further waters the seed embedded in their subaltern minds earlier. Their eyes settled on a sail ride displayed in the window. Its hideous price tag read, one thousand one hundred cardinal dollars (510). Shocked and taken back they could not believe that anyone would pay that much money to entertain a child, one child immediately asked, This boat for Kids, Miss Moore? (510). This growing seed in their minds sparks the questi on of, wherefore some people can afford such expensive toys and not others, as they enter the store. As they finish in the toy store and get home, Miss Moore prods the children to see if they had grasped the lesson as she intended. Sugar, one of the children spoke and verbalize You know, Miss Moore, I dont think all of us here put together eat in a class what that sailboat costs (512). Miss Moore was elated to find that the message of loving inequality had been relayed to at least one of the children.