Hard Lessons: Teaching 9/11 To A Generation Too Young To Remember It

Most people can tell you exactly what they were doing on September 11, 2001. For many of us, the moment when we first heard that terrorists had hijacked planes and crashed them into New York's World Trade Center is burned into our memory, along with all the awful images that were so often repeated in the days that followed.

When you live with such vivid memories, it's easy to forget that not everyone remembers this. In fact, a whole generation wasn't even born when it happened and, though students in high school are old enough to remember the events, they often lack the information and context that went along with it.   

"Kids do get a jumbled sense of what it was all about," said Brett Eckhart, head of social studies at Lyme-Old Lyme High School. "They confuse Osama Bin Laden with Saddam Hussein. Those two figures are inexorably linked. That’s one of the more glaring elements."

The job of filling in those blanks falls to teachers such as Eckhart. But for some, it's difficult to keep the emotions the event stirs from filtering into the classroom.

"It's very difficult," said Alan Marcus, associate professor of curriculum and instruction
 at UConn Neag School of Education, who works with social studies teachers throughout the state helping them develop lesson plans to teach students about 9/11. 

"Lived memory versus learned memory, that really shapes how [teachers and students] think and feel about an event. Teachers face some very interesting challenges. Some struggle because they have such a lived memory, especially in Connecticut where they may know somebody who died," said Marcus. "Part of the struggle is helping teachers see it as a content area to be taught."

A Different Perspective

With any subject, Eckhart said, teachers aim to present students with information in an unbiased way, give them all sides of a story, and let them form their own opinions. That's not easy to do with 9/11.

"I’ve certainly known teachers to become too emotionally invested," Eckhart said. "It’s difficult on this particular day to say this is the perspective from the Al Qaeda point of view, this was the ripple effect through the Middle East, to teach is there are two sides to this story."

On the anniversary of 9/11, Marcus said, teachers also have to find the right balance between honoring the memory of what happened and using it as a teachable moment. But teaching it as a part of U.S. history is a challenge, he added, because "It’s so recent we’re still figuring out how we remember it."

By contrast, for students those memories—if they have them at all—are more remote. 

"I was teaching in this building [on 9/11] and there were kids running around terrified because they had siblings or parents in New York that day," Eckhart said. The students in his classes now, however, have a more distanced perspective.

"Kids today are starting to remember it from the recognition of it year after year," Eckhart said. "Instead of remembering where they were, it’s like watching a home video. Instead of remembering that moment, they remember the video of that moment." 

As fresh as our memories may be, at some point 9/11 will become just another part of the curriculum in a modern world history class, just as the assignation of John F. Kennedy did.

Eventually, teachers will be discussing this attack with the same matter-of-factness that they now have when they teach about the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Someday, that will happen. But it will not be this day.