My post for the day is over at CNN. It’s entitled “My View: How schools should handle 9/11 in class,” and it begins:
I can vividly remember September 11, 2001, but today’s fifth-graders were not even born on that day. For them, September 11 is history – and often, a topic in their history class. Most teachers use best-selling civics and American history textbooks that describe the attacks on New York and Washington. And as of last fall, 21 states specifically mentioned 9/11 in their social studies standards.
Those are results from a scan of state laws and textbooks conducted by William & Mary professor Jeremy Stoddard and University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Diana Hess. My organization, CIRCLE, published its study last year. The authors tell me that not much has changed since then.
When we released the study, many readers expressed dismay that September 11 was mentioned in less than half of the states’ standards – as if that meant that policymakers and educators did not care enough about terrorism. When lawmakers are concerned about any topic, they are often tempted to add it to the state’s social studies standards. The Illinois Legislature, for instance, has passed bills requiring or encouraging social studies teachers to spend time on Leif Erickson, the Irish Potato Famine and the importance of trees and birds. So why not mandate teaching 9/11?
[…]
The most important back-to-school question about September 11 is not whether to require it in standards, but how to address it if teachers decide to discuss it at all. …
As I am reading your piece on how to teach 9/11 I am thinking about the Cold War and how students in the 1950’s were taught to get under desks and protect themselves if a nuclear war broke out between the US and the USSR. How was that enemy explained? But, then, things were much simpler and more black and white in those days.
I don’t know much about the history of how we’ve taught current events. A reporter asked me that yesterday and I had to duck his question. My own father attended elementary school during WWII and said that no one ever talked about the war in school. (The student body was Jewish and the teachers were Irish, so perhaps the teachers were reluctant to bring it up.)