Cathy Lanigan: “Sen. Johnson, let’s keep our children safe from poverty, gun violence, war, and pollution. The reading will take care of itself.”
Sen. John Johnson, R-Ogden, comments on a bill in the Senate, on Friday, Feb. 26, 2021.At the June 14 Education Interim Committee meeting, elected state legislators worked hard to protect our children … from reading.by Erin Gruwell from Utah high school curricula. This book, frequently taught at the high school level, documents the experiences of one young teacher and her students as they navigate the overwhelming challenges of poverty and violence.
Reading about other disadvantaged youth throughout history offers Gruwell’s students a critical lifeline. To be clear, our elected legislators worry that students need to be protected from books about growing up in impoverished communities and the elevating effects of reading? For far too many of our youth, this means protecting them from reading about lives too much like their own.8.
, the most recent year the data is available. Those 8.5% of Utah school children are likely to have lived experiences with distinct similarities to Gruwell’s students and would therefore stand to benefit directly by understanding the ways that reading carved a path up and out of desperate situations.
Representatives like John Johnson are proposing punitive legal action against educators and school librarians who dare expose our children to this “pornography.” In other words, Sen. Johnson is arguing that the lived reality of youth in disadvantaged situations is pornographic and harmful to the students of Utah.
The potentially damaging fallout from HB 374 goes much, much farther than limiting classroom materials. Pulling material from school libraries is even more extreme because it restricts student choice as protected by the First Amendment. Furthermore, the threat of legal action against our educators and librarians implies that materials have not already been filtered and selected by credentialed and vetted professionals.
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