I could only look around me: Atticus and my uncle, who went to school at home, knew everything —at least what one didn’t know the other did. . . As for me, I knew nothing except what I gathered from Time magazine and reading everything I could lay hands on at home, but as I inched sluggishly along the treadmill of the Maycomb County school system, I could not help receiving the impression that I was being cheated out of something. Out of what I knew not, yet I did not believe that twelve years of unrelieved boredom was exactly what the state had in mind for me.

We read this book for my co-op American Literature class. I think the quote speaks for itself.