Viewpoint: Penny Culliton – New law has absurd potential
Published: 08-15-2024 11:33 AM |
As New Hampshire teachers ready ourselves and our classrooms for the upcoming school year, a new law has cast a pall over those preparations.
Recently, Gov. Chris Sununu signed HB 1312 into law, which unnecessarily and vaguely expands our state’s curriculum notice requirement to include content related to sexual orientation, gender, gender expression and gender identity – in any class, not just health and sexual education.
As a teacher of English (mostly literature) on the secondary level in New Hampshire for over 40 years, I am extremely concerned that this law erroneously suggests that there is something wrong or objectionable in just about everything we teach. This law codifies an extreme technical advisory that Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut distributed to school districts in 2023 that required a two-week notice for the teaching of “human sexuality” in “social, cultural, emotional” aspects which would encompass all literary pieces and biographics.
Because literature is about human beings, it cannot be discussed without some reference to sexual orientation (everyone has one) or gender (again, everyone has one), even if those terms are not used. Because literature is written by human beings, we also cannot discuss works without discussing the lives of very real people who created them.
My teaching practice is to try to post lesson plans two weeks in advance for students and families to review. I welcome families having conversations about these texts and reading and reviewing coursework with their students. That, however, is very different from the demand in this new law that certain items be flagged for parents as likely candidates for the label “objectionable materials” – indicating they are somehow “bad.”
With this new law, it is possible literature courses could have at least three quarters of their reading lists flagged.
Marriage and fidelity/infidelity? “The Scarlet Letter,” “Madame Bovary,” “Death of a Salesman,” “The Awakening,” “O Pioneers!” “The Crucible.”
Love, passion and attachment? “Romeo and Juliet,” “Othello,” the poems of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, “The Great Gatsby,” the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
Article continues after...
Yesterday's Most Read Articles
Gender roles, norms and nonconformity? “Paul’s Case,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Yellow Wallpaper” and numerous newer young adult books such as “The 57 Bus.” The biographies of many authors, including Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Dickinson, Whitman and Cather would all be flagged.
The list is endless, but I think the point is clear. The potential of this law is absurd.
The subtext of this law, taking into account previous guidance from the NH Department of Education, is that there is something wrong about basic human relationships. There is not; literature and the discussions we have around it help teach young adults how to navigate this most important realm of life. Therefore, school districts must develop policies that apply the law narrowly to reduce the burden on educators and encourage these important conversations in the classroom.
Penny Culliton lives in Temple, and is an English teacher at Mascenic Regional High School in New Ipswich.