Freedom Writers Diary

The Freedom Writers Diary, written by The Freedom Writers and Erin Gruwell, is a book compiled of diary entries written by Erin Gruwell’s students. These diary entries detail the students’ lives; their struggles, their achievements, and their failures. Many say that this book is “inappropriate,” and try to ban this book from school curriculums because of the real topics that this book goes over, such as addiction, abuse, racism, and more. However, reading about these topics is actually beneficial to students. By allowing students to relate to characters in the book, students are able to see that they are not alone in their struggles.

In their diary entries, The Freedom Writers shed light on physical abuse, which can allow students to see that what they are going through is not normal. When the students read The Color Purple by Alice Walker, multiple students relate abuse they personally experience to what Celie experiences in the novel. One student writes about how they “...always knew I had to be careful and protect my mom because my stepdad is a professional alcoholic...He doesn’t care about anything and tries to destroy anything that gets in his way. My mother, like Celie, could not defend herself against a drunken alcoholic” (Gruwell 131-132). Their

This is especially true considering the fact that this book is compiled of what happened in the lives of real high school students. The students write in their diary entries about their personal experiences with abuse, mental illness, addiction, violence, gangs, death, homelessness, and more. This boy is beneficial to students because it contains all of these topics, even though some may deem them too “inappropriate” for high school students. Students need to read about these kinds of things because they might be going through these situations themselves, and this book can allow them to see what they should do about