The Help by Kathryn Stockett Essay
Skeeter is a very inquisitive woman. She seeks knowledge and refuses to accept what has been told to her as truth. While she is a very independent thinker she has always been taught to keep silent. As Skeeter progresses through the story she begins to learn things about how she was raised and about the people around her. Skeeter begins to question her own upbringing, and her desire to discover what happened to Constantine becomes even stronger. Skeeter’s learning process can be analyzed through the study of Malcolm Knowles’ Andragogy “the art and science” of helping adults learn. Knowles looked at how adults learn through the lens of six assumptions. Knowles’ assumptions theorize that adults are self-directed independent learners motivated by internal reasons. As Skeeter learns and expands her knowledge and understand a coorelation begins to develop with Knowles assumptions that as adults mature they move from a dependent personality towards one of self-directed learning, an adult accumulates a growing reservoir of experience, the readiness of an adult to learn is closely related to the developmental tasks of his or her social role, adults are motivated internally rather externally, and adults need to know why they need to learn something (Knowles, 1984).
Skeeter begins to mature as the story progresses and fails to accept the dependent mentality that has been taught to her as a child. She learns that there