I am incredibly fortunate.  No one in my family was directly affected by September 11th, though most of them live and work in the Northeast.  The closest I came was an Uncle that regularly flew on one of the two flights from Boston that hit the Towers.  He was lucky… it wasn’t one of his regular travel days.  I was working in a hospital in North Carolina and we all crowded into the maintenance room where they had a TV to watch.  It was stunning and so very sad.  My sister and her friend were in Germany at the time and I remember my parents called her and asked them to please find a major town and just stay put for a few days.  Grief and uncertainty.  That’s what I remember most about that day.

The question has been raised by everyone from NPR to my wife about how we teach September 11th.  It’s a very good question.  We asked our kids what they knew, and they said terrorists that hated America had attacked us.  We asked them what a terrorist was, and they couldn’t explain.  These are 5th and 4th graders!  Somewhere along the line our educational system has decided to be vanilla about the attacks.  There’s no talk of extremism or what could have motivated the attackers.  My son and his friends think we are still at war with Iraq and Afghanistan, not understanding that what we are trying to do is help them have peace.  I tried to correct them and was basically looked at like I was crazy.

I don’t have all the answers.  I’m not a teacher.  I am a parent however, and I WANT my children to know and understand.  Not to scare them (although I admit I was afraid in those dark days) but to teach them.  The famous quote “Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it” is just as valid today.  Terrorism doesn’t go away just because we don’t acknowledge it no amtter what the source.  Teaching sanitized versions of events doesn’t spare feelings, it under educates our children.  And that is something I’m just not going to be in favor of.  So I’m going to ask what our curriculum is, and why.  We’ll see what kind of answer I get.