AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
For many of us who lived through 9/11, it does not feel like a quarter-century ago. But for high schoolers, 2001 is history, literally. Taylor Browne teaches AP U.S. history at BASIS Charter School in Washington, D.C.
TAYLOR BROWNE: Students are really not closely emotionally tied to it. They more so look at the ads. Oh, that makes sense on why we have security, and we have TSA, and we can't bring water bottles, or we can't bring certain things on the airplane - oh, OK, let's move on to the next thing.
It is disappointing because it was a huge historical event in our lifetime that people still experience to this very day. I'm a born-and-raised Washingtonian. I have friends who lost their parents at the Pentagon.
RASCOE: So how do we convey to students the gravity of that day and what followed? Jeremy Stoddard has been analyzing how schools do and don't teach about the attacks and the subsequent global war on terror. He's a professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Wisconsin's Center for Education Research, and he joins us now. Welcome to the program.
JEREMY STODDARD: Thanks for having me.
RASCOE: You've identified some shortcomings in what's taught in history classrooms concerning 9/11. What are the main ones that stick out to you?
STODDARD: I think one of the challenges is for teachers especially that have direct memory of 9/11, they want to convey that to students. They oftentimes then talk about their experience that day - that it was a shocking attack, that the sort of heroes of the day were the firemen and first responders, and that one of the results was sort of the U.S. coming together and the world around it in response to these terrorist attacks.
One of the tensions that we're finding, especially as teachers now - a larger proportion either don't have direct memory or very young, is that shift from, should 9/11 be taught as history? - and to use it to focus on all of the issues today that are sort of legacies of the response to 9/11, or should we continue to focus on sort of the commemoration of the victims of the day and use it as a form of sort of character education, meaning, you know, that we want people to respond like people that day did?
RASCOE: We've heard a lot, and NPR has reported a lot about changes to standards and textbooks in states like Texas. So do different states have different ways of teaching 9/11?
STODDARD: Absolutely. And even the role of standards play different roles in those different states in terms of how much emphasis they have on what teachers actually teach. In some states, they're a guide. In some states like Florida now, there's state legislation requiring every school to teach 45 minutes on the anniversary.
And I think one of the challenges of that is the timing. The September 11 anniversary, when many teachers feel compelled to want to do something that day, you know, that's nowhere near what they would normally be teaching in that sort of time period which would come at the end of the year. So we have seen some teachers who use the anniversary in the events of 9/11 to develop skills around, say, examining different types of evidence. So they go more in depth around not just the day events, but also sort of the things that happened after or those leading into it.
RASCOE: What are your recommendations? Like, how should middle and high schools teach 9/11?
STODDARD: I think the biggest thing for us is, if you treat it sort of as this one emotional sort of collective memory moment, one, the students aren't really connecting it to all the things that have come since it, especially, but you also open the door for conspiracy theories, which we know students - if they're interested and they want to learn more about it, if they start searching, that's what they're going to find, likely.
So in most of what we've done, we encourage teachers to use the events of the day as a starting point to inquire either into the events that came before it, such as the role of the U.S. in Afghanistan in the 1970s, or what happened in the response and sort of connect that to what's today. And at the beginning of the year, that's not a bad thing to do in terms of starting to help students understand the connections between the present and the past and hopefully learn how to be informed and what those decisions mean. I mean, that's one of our goals of teaching history in the first place.
RASCOE: Do you also think teachers should be talking about issues like Islamophobia, which obviously came up a lot after 9/11 and still dealing with it today?
STODDARD: Yeah. The sort of portrayal of Muslim Americans and Arab Americans in the wake of it is often something that is left out. So that's definitely one of the topics that we've focused on teachers teaching about. And there's lots of great evidence in the wake of the attacks from some of the Arab American magazines to one of the speeches from George W. Bush, where they're really aware that this was possibly going to happen and trying to counter that. That's a really important take, especially today when we've seen the news, you know, with the withdrawal of Afghanistan, certain refugees that have come into the country and how they're being portrayed and sort of the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East.
RASCOE: And how does, like, the teaching of 9/11 compare to teaching other historical tragedies like Pearl Harbor?
STODDARD: Yeah. So that's one of the questions we asked. I think Pearl Harbor, because it was so associated with the U.S. entry into World War II, it became part of that larger story. One of the challenges of 9/11, I think - it led to this ongoing global war on terror, but I think that impacted sort of the majority of Americans on a daily basis far less than World War II did. And so it seems almost like this isolated event not fully integrated in the story in some way.
So most U.S. history textbooks, for example, include it in, like, a unit on the Bush administration. So I think it's still trying to, in many ways, in terms of official curriculum sources, trying to figure out what it is a story of and sort of how it fits into the longer narrative of U.S. history.
RASCOE: That's Jeremy Stoddard of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research. Thank you so much for speaking with us.
STODDARD: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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