At four years old, Dawn Goldstein discovered a magazine hidden beneath her parents’ bathroom sink in Hollywood, Florida. She didn’t fully understand what she was looking at in the pages of Playgirl, but she understood what children always seem to grasp intuitively—that there were entire worlds adults kept tucked away beneath ordinary life.
That moment became the opening chapter of what would become her life’s work: teaching the curriculum no one else will.
After three decades in education, working with over 50,000 students and honing her expertise as a College of Education Professor at NSU’s Abraham S. Fischler College of Education and School of Criminal Justice, Goldstein now operates as a full-time, WBE (Women Business Enterprise) and WOSB (Women-Owned Small Business) certified solo entrepreneur. She is also an approved vendor for both Broward County Public Schools and Miami-Dade County Public Schools, placing her work directly inside two of the largest public school districts in the country—and the two largest in Florida. Now dedicating her time entirely to her LLC, she has arrived at a conclusion that challenges the foundation of how we approach both education and mental health: we live in a culture that teaches algebra but not bodies, citation format but not consent. We’ve created generations fluent in information yet starving for the wisdom to navigate their own lived experiences.
The statistics tell a devastating story. One in four girls and one in thirteen boys will experience childhood sexual assault before turning eighteen. Most will never tell anyone. Meanwhile, young people are drowning in twin epidemics of loneliness and mental health collapse that traditional interventions have failed to solve.
Goldstein doesn’t believe we failed on purpose. “We were just never given the map,” she explains.
So she wrote one. Her guiding principle—Maslow Before Bloom—holds that we cannot ask people to learn until we’ve first addressed their need to feel safe, whole, and seen. It is a philosophy that places human dignity before academic performance, and it runs beneath everything she builds.
The Framework No One Else Is Teaching
The Pleasure Curriculum™, Goldstein’s framework for sexual literacy as a pillar of mental health, operates on six dimensions of wellness: Body Literacy, Emotional Intelligence, Communication, Consent & Boundaries, Relational Ethics, and Pleasure & Joy. It’s designed not as a warning or a scandal, but as a conversation about wholeness.
“Shame quietly erodes every single one of them,” Goldstein says of these dimensions. “Genuine, real, embodied, informed joy restores them.”
The research supports her approach. When people gain language for their bodies, boundaries, and worth, rates of abuse, depression, and suicidal ideation measurably fall. Yet this remains the conversation we avoid in schools, workplaces, and even most therapeutic settings.
Goldstein speaks from hard-won personal authority. She is the mother of three college-age daughters, a CSA survivor, and a widow. She and her husband tried to heal each other. She survived. He didn’t.
That is not a footnote to her work—it is the reason for it.
“I don’t speak about this from a textbook,” she reflects. “I speak from the full, complicated, luminous truth of a life lived in language.”
What Literacy Actually Means
Goldstein’s youngest daughter, Ava, learned to read during the 2008 recession. As a toddler, she pressed her nose to storefront glass in South Florida and recognized the word plastered everywhere: Available. “Wook, mama! Avaiwabul,” she announced proudly.
“She saw herself in the letters before she even understood them,” Goldstein recalls. “That’s how literacy starts. That’s exactly how it starts.”
The parallel is intentional. Just as we teach children to decode letters and words, we must teach them to read the texts they carry within themselves—their bodies, desires, boundaries, and worth. Without that foundational literacy, people navigate the world without a vocabulary for their own experiences.
The question Goldstein hears most often after her presentations isn’t whether the material was appropriate. It’s why no one taught this sooner.
Filling the Shelves
As the founder of Freely Reading™, Goldstein has built a career on giving people language they were never offered. The platform—anchored by the tagline Literacy Is Liberation—organizes its work across six content pillars: Literacy, CEO of Your Brain™, Pleasure, Humanity vs. Brutality™, GlowCode Letters, and A Girl from HOLLYWOOD. Her work as an award-winning educator extends beyond traditional classroom walls into organizations, communities, and families seeking frameworks that actually address the root causes of mental health struggles.
Anchoring the pedagogy is her BOGA™ framework—Breaking the Code, Owning the Voice, Growing the Mind, Anchoring the Heart—a four-pillar literacy spine for educators. Beneath it all sits the Glow Code™, her six-principle philosophy of luminous living that gives the entire ecosystem its moral architecture.
The Freely Reading™ ecosystem reflects that breadth. The Pleasure Curriculum™ addresses sexual health and wellness. The Freely Reading library brings online and offline, rigorous, culturally responsive literacy instruction with 135+ texts spanning novels, short stories, poems, plays, and speeches — each featuring comprehensive pedagogical frameworks including Anticipation Guides, Bloom’s Learning Menus, I.A. Richards’ Layers of Meaning, Critical Thinking tools like QAR, RAFT writing prompts, Story Pyramids, Fluency passages, and Vocabulary systems — the library serves K–12 and beyond with materials designed for deep engagement and measurable growth. The Illuminate Collective™ and The Sacred Hour™ coaching programs offer community-based and one-on-one support for adults doing the deeper work of self-understanding.
Most recently, Goldstein launched Nobody Taught Us This™—a trilingual healing journal series available in English, Spanish (Nadie Nos Enseñó Esto™), and Haitian Creole (Yo Pa Aprann Nou Sa™). The trilingual reach is intentional: it ensures the work meets readers in the language their bodies first learned to feel in. It is perhaps the most direct embodiment of her life’s thesis—that the questions we were never given language for deserve a space to be named, honored, and finally answered. The series is available in print or digital form at freelyreading.com, and Goldstein has designed it to reach anyone—regardless of geography, income, or language—who is on a healing journey.
The Tool That Turns Any Text Into a Game
In keeping with her conviction that learning sticks when bodies, brains, and joy are in the room together, Goldstein recently released the Game Generator—a free, AI-powered tool that turns any block of text into seventeen ready-to-play game decks. A teacher pastes a chapter; a parent pastes a poem; a college student pastes their study guide. Within seconds, the tool generates Jeopardy, Pyramid, Family Feud, Codenames, Literary Clue, and eleven other classroom classics, plus the original Glow family—Glow Quest, Glow Gate Defense, Glow Bingo, Glow Match, Glow Libs, and Glow Pursuit—formats designed by Goldstein specifically to rehearse vocabulary and inference under high-stakes, high-energy retrieval.
“Games aren’t fluff,” Goldstein insists. “They’re how the brain consolidates vocabulary, builds inference, and rehearses retrieval—the three things every reading assessment measures. When the game content comes from the text someone just read, you’re not adding a fun activity on top of instruction. You’re running the rehearsal that makes the instruction stick.”
The tool serves the entire learner spectrum—K through college, gamers and grown-ups, homeschool families and curious adults—and is available now at freelyreading.com/story-game-generator. Like the rest of the Freely Reading™ platform, it lives in three languages and is free to use, with optional licensing tiers for districts and classrooms that want unlimited generations and printable PDF bundles.
The four-year-old reading under the bathroom sink wasn’t doing anything wrong, Goldstein insists. She was doing what all readers do—looking for language that explained the world she was already living in.
“All of us are that child,” she says. “We came into this world with questions in our bodies, and we were handed a curriculum that pretended those questions didn’t exist.”
The work of changing that reality happens in schools, organizations, and homes. It requires adults willing to acknowledge that sexual health and mental health aren’t separate conversations but deeply interwoven dimensions of human wholeness.
“Your body is a library,” Goldstein tells audiences. “Let’s finally teach people how to read it.”
For a generation raised on internet access but starved of genuine wisdom about navigating embodied human experience, that library has remained largely locked. Goldstein is handing out keys—not through shame, fear, or avoidance, but through the same luminous attention she brought to reading as a child.
“Keep glowing. Keep building,” she tells her readers in the closing line of every Field Notes essay. That conversation has a home now: freelyreading.com/new-here.
They just didn’t know the library had a name.
Contact
Dawn Goldstein
dawn@freelyreading.com
freelyreading.com