Teaching about 9/11 in 2011: What Our Children Need to Know

In the decade since September 11, 2001, much that affects almost every American has changed: Memorials have been built and visited. Ceremonies and commemorations have been held. Osama bin Laden has been taken out. Further acts of terrorism have been perpetrated and more (as far as everyone knows) have been fended off. Yet some things haven't changed much. These include the arrival around this time each year of a new generation of children into the nation's schools and the challenges that their teachers face in equipping them with the skills and knowledge that young Americans need. Today--as for the past nine Septembers--that challenge includes determining what and how to teach them about both the events of September 11, 2001 in particular and the larger issues surrounding those events. Within months of the September 11 attacks, the people at Fordham resolved to try to help educators wrestling with such challenges. So they asked a number of distinguished educators, historians, and other scholars, public officials, and thoughtful pundits to share their own thinking on what and how to teach about September 11 and the issues surrounding it. The response was gratifying, albeit not surprising. By September 2002, they were able to publish twenty-three terrific short essays in one compilation, "September 11: What Our Children Need to Know." In the months that followed, however, the nonsense continued to spew, so they resolved to try again. They invited the original authors to revise and update their essays--most did--and they added a few more. In September 2003, they brought out "Terrorists, Despots, and Democracy: What Our Children Need to Know." Almost everything in those two volumes remains fresh and almost alarmingly germane today. This publication offers ten of the best and most enduring of those essays. This publication begins with an introduction by Chester E. Finn, Jr. The following essays are included: (1) Seven Questions About September (Lamar Alexander); (2) From the Personal to the Political, for the Love of Freedom (William Damon); (3) Civic and Historical Literacy for a Dangerous World (Lucien Ellington); (4) Six Truths About America (William Galston); (5) Preserving America, Man's Greatest Hope (Victor Davis Hanson); (6) Defending American Tolerance (Craig Kennedy); (7) What Is "Education for Democracy"? (Katherine Kersten); (8) Forging Heroes (Walter Russell Mead); (9) America: Always Vulnerable, Never Inevitable (Richard Rodriguez); and (10) A Basic Education for the Post-9/11 World (Andrew J. Rotherham).