by Nate Johnson
3rd Year of Teaching
Every year I have been in school, from kindergarten to my teaching career, I have participated in the ritualistic mourning of the thousands that lost their lives in the September 11th terrorist attacks. Classrooms become somber and heavy with quiet sobs from the back of the room and fear is instilled in us with the words “never forget” mumbled under our breath. We watch a video, have a moment of silence, and take ten minutes out of one day a year.
For years I have been wondering, why are we doing this? I was about four and a half when the attacks happened; I have no memory of the attacks and neither do my students. It is because of this that we have collectively reached the precipice of social obsolescence in terms of never forgetting in the classroom. I, a person who does not remember 9/11, am asked to “teach” the day to students who were not even born yet. I am not unique in this endeavor. There are hundreds of teachers like me and thousands more to come. The main problem is that we don’t teach anything. Students are asked to sit in a dark and silent classroom while b-roll of a tragedy plays across a screen. Maybe there will be a discussion where two very proud voices will echo back media warnings that “if we forget then it will happen again.” But this is not remembering; this is mourning.
It is to this point that I extend my question: who is this for? Our students live in the fallout of the infamous day. The attacks have rewritten the fabric of our society from increased homeland security, Islamophobia, radical patriotism, and the longest war in American history. But we don’t talk about these things, and we need to. In a world of hyper-supervision in education there isn’t the room to have a building-wide, nuanced, discussion about 9/11, or empathy, or cultural upheaval, for a day that is no more resonant to our students than Pearl Harbor or Vietnam.
Instead, we have boiled down, for twenty years, the infamy of September 11th to what got America into trouble in the first place: fear, anger, unity over loss alone. The day has become a symbol for American freedom and patriotism, but we don’t teach that. We teach the fear and the anger of the moment like it was a perennial atrocity. It is time to recognize that 9/11 is modern history. Taking time out of the school day to discuss terror and patriotism doesn’t benefit the kids. There isn’t enough time to think critically or to have nuanced discussion. Without critical thought we teeter dangerously close to perpetuating the propaganda that took us to the Middle East.
So, why are we doing this? Who is it for? We do it for the adults who continue to mourn—as they can and should, of course, if they need to—but they are not in our classrooms. We do this to mourn the generational loss of American exceptionalism and an innocence that our current generation of students never had the pleasure of experiencing. It is much like going to a funeral for someone your parents knew. We understand that we should be sad, but we just don’t have the memories to make the service meaningful. It is no longer the place of every classroom to discuss 9/11. While it may be difficult for many to reconcile the truth that they have lived through history, it is time to frame this historical event as something other than simply a day to never forget.