The moral lesson of The Freedom Writers Diary is that education is not merely the acquisition of facts, but a powerful process that brings out students' common humanity by increasing their understanding of others. The incident that led Gruwell to settle on her course of study involved a racial caricature produced by a student that she intercepted in class. When Gruwell said that this was the type of bigotry that enabled the Holocaust to take place, her students had no idea what she was talking about.
It is, of course, quite possible to be a decent, compassionate person who has never heard of the Holocaust, but Gruwell believed that her students would be morally as well as intellectually improved if they were educated in such matters. Putting themselves in the position of Anne Frank and relating their lives to hers, she believed, would teach them compassion and empathy. At the...
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same time, it would give them some of the tools necessary to understand what was happening in their own lives and change them for the better.
The students' own journal entries in the book demonstrate the power of education to inspire people with a desire to fight against injustice, armed with a clear vision of how much better the world could be.
What does The Freedom Writers Diary teach us?
It’s possible to claim that The Freedom Writers Diary teaches one that people, regardless of their race, have problems. Everyone, in some way, is struggling and dealing with difficulties, which is why it might be a good idea to try and treat all humans with a semblance of compassion.
The notion that each individual is experiencing a level of turmoil is reflected in the various hardships depicted in diary entries. The teens have to deal with, among other issues, homelessness, testifying in court, and being banned from a field trip because of their clothes.
The book could also teach one that there’s no such thing as “unteachable kids.” As Erin Gruwell’s program demonstrates, her students weren’t somehow fundamentally dumb. They just needed someone to care about them and push them to express their complex thoughts. In this sense, after reading The Freedom Writers Diary, one could have come away with the lesson that learning isn’t just about the individual but the environment that the individual is in.
A third lesson from The Freedom Writers Diary is the power of literature. While Gruwell’s students originally hated writing, they learned through their studies with her that writing can be a powerful way for them to process their lives and understand them in relation to stories from the past. The students found inspiration in the stories of others who had recorded their lives, such as Anne Frank and Zlata Filipović. The students were able to relate to the oppression those figures endured because of the powerful diaries they left behind.
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