American Culture today reflects upon it’s great past that has long been forgotten. The novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, presents many ideas about American Culture during the late 1800’s. One major theme found was Ignorance. Ignorance in education, and, something still found today, ignorance of racism. Both which played an important part in the shaping of the culture we know today.

       To begin with, today children are required by law to attend school, back in the 1800’s parents chose their child’s path to the future. Towards the beginning of the novel the main character, Huckleberry Finn, lived with the Widow Douglas, who made him go to school. Later on, his father finds him and is outraged that his son is more intelligent than himself so, demands that he quit immediately and stop learning. “…And looky here–you drop that school, you hear? I’ll learn people to bring up a boy to put on airs over his own father and let on be better’n what he is. You lemme catch you fooling around that school again, you hear? Your mother couldn’t read, and she couldn’t write, nuther, before she died. None of the family couldn’t before they died. I can’t; and here you’re a-swelling yourself up like this. I ain’t the man to stand it—you hear?” (Twain, 19-20) Huck’s father forced his son to be ignorant of knowledge because it was allowed. The Author, Mark Twain, illustrates the idea of ignorance in education throughout the entire novel by writing in the different dialects and each dialect suggested the amount of education a person had received. Even then some, ignorance in education was not always a choice, but forced upon by racism, too.

        Furthermore, racism also shows the ignorance of the American Culture in the 1800’s. The first example of this is when Huckleberry Finn is thought to be dead and by coincidence Jim runs away that same night. “…But before the night they changed around and judged it was done by a runaway nigger named Jim.” (Twain, 56) Everyone automatically assume that a black man had done it the moment he, by coincidence, went missing without allowing reasoning to his disappearance. Another example of ignorance is the use of the word “nigger”. People used it to identify a person who was black in a demeaning way. Then, it became a common saying among the everyday person and the real meaning was forgotten, but they still suffered. Ignorance is a choice that could have been changed.

      To conclude, the late 1800’s American Culture is well described by one of this novel’s themes of Ignorance. The novels show the ignorance in education and ignorance of racism found then. Since then American Culture has developed, and ignorance has become less and less of description of the American people.