Sample Solution

this short story describes if given a chance to create one’s own happiness doesn’t mean being wealth or not. It means one knows how to create that happiness the best way they can. The Lesson is set in Harlem and narrated by a little girl named Sylvia. Ms. Moore, Sylvia, and a group of her other classmates go to a high class toy store in Manhattan called F.A.O Schwarz. While there the children learn an important lesson about the economy and how unfair it is in the black communities. Having unjust economic and social system creating unfair access to money and resources for black Americans is a prevalent theme in the story “The Lesson”.
The difference between black society and white society is the lifestyles and what each class finds more important or necessary. In this wealthy white neighborhood it is common to spend obscene amounts of money on toys and really anything a black poor family would deem unnecessary for the price. They compare the handcrafted fiberglass sailboat, which costs $1,195, to the ones they make from a kit, which cost about 50 cents. Sylvia further thinks about what her family could buy with the $35 a clown costs: bunk beds, a family visit to Grandaddy out in the country, even the rent, and the piano bills. For one thing Sylvia states “…Where we are is who we are, Miss Moore always pointin out. But it don’t necessarily have to be that way…”(39). When Sylvia reiterates what Ms. Moore has said before it means that people’s lives and personalities are molded by the status and atmosphere in which they live. The children’s perspective on life is opposed from those that shop at F.A.O Schwartz, because of their poor upbringing. “One major point of the story is the criticism of a capitalist society, in which wealth is unequally distributed”(Champion). Wealth and race are essentially linked therefore making it hard for white people and African-American peo