Teaching the Lessons of 9/11
Casey, Leo
AS THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY Of September 11 approached, a controversy over the meaning of that fateful day and the place it will occupy in our national self-understanding irrupted into...
...Indeed, a discussion of this ideology is a serious lacuna in virtually all of the educational literature on 9/11, left, right, and center...
...The Times even managed to misrepresent the sentiments of a number of classroom teachers who were quoted as being critical of the NEA Web site when they were actually supportive...
...Education writer Alfie Kohn announces in the Rethinking Schools special issue on "War, Terrorism and Our Classrooms" that the attacks "had a context and perhaps a motive that are perfectly comprehensible," with origins in the reality "that the United States has no problem with terrorism as long as its victims don't live here or look like most of us...
...If they could agree on nothing else, all parties to this debate believed that the battle for their vision of 9/11 would be won or lost in the classroom...
...Who was responsible for such murderous deeds...
...Consider some of the pedagogical possibilities...
...Respect for those who died, Wills says, demands that memorial ceremonies invoke the specificity of their death and their sacrifice...
...For all their insistence upon the importance of context in understanding and teaching the lessons of 9/11, the practitioners of this approach ignore the most basic of contexts: the theocratic and totalitarian worldview that inspired these horrible acts...
...The family flees and two weeks later arrives, in the words of young Osama, in the "land of the free...
...In this respect, his essay is representative of the general tenor of the Teachers' College Record's special issue on 9/11...
...And it is based on the inclusive citizenship of a pluralist democracy...
...In the same vein, Finn and a number of other conservative commentators object to lessons on the Japanese-American internment during the Second World War...
...Washington Post columnist and ABC television commentator George Will reiterated the claims of the Times, mocking the "pitter-patter about 'diversity' and 'tolerance' on the NEA Web site...
...it inspired the passengers of Flight 93 to refuse to allow their plane to become a weapon to kill others...
...If the special 9/11 issue of Teachers College Record is any indication, significant segments of the left in schools of education are so alienated from all things American that they have lost touch with political reality...
...Then the daily playing of the national anthem could become a vivid lesson in the cultural pluralism of America, a living e pluribus unum...
...In Why We Fight, a 170-page polemic, Bennett manages only a few critical paragraphs on the "blame America" right, and then dismisses such sentiments as inconsequential because those conservatives "wield little or no influence over mainstream American culture...
...In New York City, for example, the United Federation of Teachers gave priority to assembling a handbook on how to teach tolerance despite the fact that the union was pressed to meet the needs of members and students who had lost loved ones and to help relocate seven schools...
...Nor is there any acknowledgment that this is the same flag that flew over American troops who liberated enslaved African-Americans during the Civil War and freed concentration camp inmates at the end of the Second World War...
...The Reflecting on 9/11 Web site of the New York City chapter of Educators for Social Responsibility highlights a series of lessons in which students decide what would be the best way to remember the dead...
...For radical academics, the study of actual classrooms and schools has given way to a broad social and political analysis based on the premise, as Giroux states in his essay, that education takes place in all of society, not just schools...
...There are, of course, matters of factual accuracy such as who the hijackers were and to what organization they belonged...
...The term loses its meaning, and what could have been a very effective pedagogical exercise is undermined...
...An examination of the methods of mobilization, the modes of organization, and the ideology of these groups would identify them as a theocratic species of totalitarianism...
...The Islamist ideology of al-Qaeda has clear antecedents in and debts to European fascism, as Ladan and Roya Boroumand lay out so well in their April 2002 Journal of Democracy article on "Terror, Islam and Democracy") A look at the history of terrorism and the reliance of totalitarian movements and states on acts of terror—first analyzed by Hannah Arendt—is essential...
...Yet, based on a wide variety of post-9/11 public opinion polls, the report concludes that Americans are still more tolerant than not of Muslims (only one in four Americans consistently expressed prejudice...
...In the preface to his collection, Finn takes the NEA to task for having a Web link to a lesson on this topic...
...they saw the defense of "Western culture" as the "ultimate sin...
...Democratic patriotism is self-reflective, fully capable of criticizing the country when it falls short of its ideals...
...Chester Finn singles out for criticism a piece called "My Name Is Osama," which appears on the 9/11 Web site of the National Council for Social Studies...
...But the story does, in fact, begin with an account of why the family must leave Iraq: Osama's father is beaten by Saddam Hussein's soldiers after he refuses to put a poster of the Iraqi dictator up on the wall of his new home...
...And they would have to become aware of the consequences of fascism, from wars of aggression to concentration camps and genocide...
...In William Bennett's words, the day was won by "those Americans who had no trouble expressing their love of country in public, and no problem with their children doing the same...
...In the weeks following September 11, 2001, I debated many of the issues discussed here on the Internet with Chester Finn, whose work is examined here...
...At stake, we believed, was the ability of New Yorkers to maintain democratic ideals of tolerance and pluralism...
...They would have to learn how fascist movements created totalitarian states through such measures as one-party rule and the suppresTEACHING 9/11 sion of civil society...
...When students have to worry over the notion that it is possible to commit serious moral wrongs in the pursuit of a good cause, such as the war to defeat fascism, they will be on their way to developing a much deeper and richer moral philosophy than the one offered by William Bennett...
...What is especially revelatory in Giroux's analysis is the lack of practical suggestions about how to diminish intolerance...
...9111: Teaching History in The Making The simple queries that students in every grade bring to the study of 9/11—Why did so many innocent people have to lose their lives...
...More important, a national survey conducted by CAIR of members of Muslim communities revealed that although 57 percent had experienced some act of discrimination following 9/11, 80 percent had experienced acts of kindness and support from members of other faiths...
...Bill Bigelow's lesson on terrorism in the special 9/11 issue of Rethinking Schools (in which he has his students define and conceptualize terrorism) suggests the type of questions teachers should bring up...
...Unfortunately, Bigelow leads his students toward a concept of terrorism that is so vast and amorphous as to include every possible global injustice, from illiteracy and AIDS to famine and homelessness...
...The requirement to play the national anthem could also become the subject of creative pedagogy...
...In the online journal Salon, media observer Brendan Nyhan revealed that the entire basis for the Times's claims was a single lesson plan, written by Brian Lippincott, director of programs for the Graduate School of Psychology at California's Kennedy University...
...One essay— "On the Limits of Liberalism and Multiculturalism" by Haithe Anderson—assumes that the extreme intolerance of al-Qaeda and the Taliban represent a fundamental and unanswerable challenge to the liberal ideal of tolerance...
...Against a rhetoric of equivocation, evasion, and excuse, such "moral clarity" acquires a certain power...
...Only on the margins, among Christian and Jewish fundamentalists, did CAIR find demagogic anti-Muslim appeals...
...LEO CASEY has been nationally recognized for his work teaching civics and social studies...
...But it is our America, and one of the reasons why we love it...
...So much for his "moral clarity," with its critique of double standards and moral relativism...
...The history of the pledge of allegiance could be studied, starting with its origins as a democratic credo penned by a socialist author...
...Why was it important...
...I now work for the New York City local of the other national teacher union, the American Federation of Teachers...
...DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 57...
...In fact, the lesson plan merely called upon teachers to explain that it was wrong to blame an entire religion or entire ethnic community for the attacks...
...A controversy over the pledge of allegiance and the naDISSENT / Winter 2003 n 53 TEACHING 9/11 tional anthem in Madison, Wisconsin's public schools is a case in point...
...Indeed, all of the discourses surrounding 9/11, including the controversy over what lessons to teach, are attempts to answer these basic questions...
...A pedagogy of democratic patriotism differs in important ways from conservative calls to teach patriotism...
...That rich diversity is not his America...
...One of the follow-up questions for student discussion specifically addresses the issue of why Osama's family left Iraq for America...
...After 9/11, part of Madison's academic left protested the requirements, and the school board undertook a transparent effort to circumvent the law...
...The accusations became the focus of television political talk shows, with entire segments of Fox Cable's O'Reilly Factor and Hannity and Colmes and CNN's Talkback Live, Late Edition, and Crossfire dedicated to the subject...
...It is hard not to conclude that his real opposition is to a lesson focused on countering anti-Arab prejudice...
...The lesson has students consider whether such treatment was justified and in accordance with American ideals, and then, drawing upon parallels between Pearl Harbor and 9/11, asks if they see the potential for mistreatment of Muslim Americans and Americans of Arabic and South Asian descent...
...A feeding frenzy of the right ensued...
...To the extent that America's teachers determine the place of 9/11 in our national memory, partisans of democracy have little cause for concern, and much reason for optimism...
...With a flourish of inflammatory rhetoric in Teachers' College Record, the prolific radical academic Henry Giroux approvingly quotes social critic Mike Davis's charge that "the good ole boy equivalent of Kristallnacht" was waged against American Muslims and Americans of Arabic and South Asian origin after 9/11...
...Unfortunately, Finn has many competitors on the academic left for the title of blind ideologue...
...The NEA's Remember 9/11 is only one of scores of web sites dedicated to the issue and produced by educational and political organizations in the period leading up to the first anniversary...
...Students would decide whether or not they agree, figTEACHING 9/11 ure out what insights might be taken from the Gettysburg Address, and write and deliver their own speeches of remembrance...
...Teacher unions, especially the NEA, have long been a favorite target of conservative pundits, and the Times's attack put the scent of blood into the water...
...SOME OF THE best lesson ideas in the 9/11 educational literature employ a pedagogy of democratic patriotism to address students' need to express their solidarity with other Americans and to memorialize those who died...
...Finn's problem seems to be with the NEA's raising this issue...
...Students study the nation's classic text of remembrance, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, but also read a newspaper column in which Gary Wills, author of the leading scholarly text on the address, criticizes its reading at 9/11 memorial ceremonies...
...The selfless sacrifice for the greater good of the community is devalued in our economy of self-interest, yet it is what inspired hundreds of firefighters, police, and emergency medical technicians to charge into the towers...
...Judge, too, was gay...
...There is no reason why such analyses can not be made accessible to high school and middle school students...
...For example, in the Teachers College Record's special issue on "Education and 9/11," Michael Apple writes about the importance of directing classroom inquiry to "why there are people in many parts of the world who have such extremely negative feelings toward the U.S...
...An analogy could be made with how the emergence of European fascism should be taught...
...But there is also a great deal in that literature—especially from the ranks of active classroom teachers and from teacher organizations—that makes a vital contribution to the educational work before us...
...Completely lost on Apple and like-minded people is the pedagogical import of Norman Thomas's sage advice to protesters during the Vietnam era: wash the flag, don't burn it...
...By the end of August, the accusations had made their way into regional newspapers from Tallahassee to Denver and across national boundaries to the Canadian National Post and the Times of London...
...and the global capitalism our economy fosters that they would go to any extreme to call attention to their cause...
...When one goes to the footnote in Davis's essay to discover the justification for such an accusation, one is directed to a record of bias incidents and hate crimes compiled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an umbrella organization of Muslim communities in the United States...
...Meanwhile, classroom teachers and their organizations have been actively engaged in finding ways to teach tolerance...
...The first sign of the controversy was a frontpage story in the August 19, 2002 edition of the conservative Washington Times, published under the headline "NEA Delivers History Lesson...
...Bingham was gay...
...The Web site also had links to more than sixty different organizations, including the Red Cross, the Public Broadcasting System, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Departments of State, Defense, and Homeland Security...
...According to the Times article, Remember 9/11 and the NEA were full of "lies...
...Writing in his weekly New York Times education column, Richard Rothstein found that the advice given in the disputed lesson plan was innocuous, "no different from that of President Bush and other national leaders...
...The left academic authors express complete political despair without any ideas for practical pedagogical and political interventions...
...Why had Osama and his family migrated to U.S...
...The Rethinking Schools discussion of Stephen Jay Gould's New York Times op-ed piece, "A Time for Gifts," encourages students to conceive of ways in which they could make similar gifts...
...Whatever the ideological mechanism that allows Finn to misrepresent this lesson so completely (does he even read the texts he criticizes...
...But Bennett's notion (like George W Bush's talk of "evildoers") skirts 52 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 the edge of a tautological conception of evil in which evil becomes the quality that makes a person commit evil deeds...
...his objections are without merit...
...In August 2001, the Wisconsin legislature amended the state budget to require that the pledge be recited and the national anthem played every day in all publicly funded schools...
...But knowledge of the perpetrators of 9/11 is indispensable to grasping why the events took place and what must be done to prevent their recurrence...
...The NEA staff have apparently busied themselves this summer," the editorial charged, "preparing lesson plans cautioning teachers not to 'suggest any group is responsible' for the terrorist airliner hijackings...
...Both the educational right and the academic left have produced much in the literature on how to teach 9/11 that demands serious criticism...
...And Bennett does not even make passing reference to the incredible mosaic of people of every faith and from every region around the world who died on 9/11...
...When journalists and scholars without a political axe to grind looked into the claims of the Washington Times, they quickly saw that the right-wing newspaper had completely misrepresented the contents of the NEA's Remember 9/11...
...Oliver North of IranContragate fame took his best shot at the NEA over the issue, and Chester Finn, assistant secretary of education during the Reagan years and now president of the right-wing Fordham Foundation (with its own publication on how to teach 9/11), rushed to get in his licks...
...The "blame America" school of thought provides the perfect foil for conservative moralist and former secretary of education William Bennett, who brings his insistence on moral absolutes to the lessons of 9/11...
...This ignores the fact that the question has been addressed across centuries of liberal political philosophy...
...The story concludes with a number of questions for students to discuss...
...To understand the evil of fascism, students would have to investigate both the economic, social, and political conditions that gave rise to it and the organizing techniques of the fascist movement (for example, its reliance on racist, militarist, and "blood and soil" ultranationalist appeals...
...None of this sits well with educators on the right...
...What can be done to ensure that there are no future 9/11s?—are the fundamental questions teachers must address...
...On the Facing History and Ourselves Web site, Malik Mufti, an Iranian expatriate and Tufts political science professor specializing in Middle Eastern politics, makes a persuasive case that calls for tolerance and warnings that bias attacks would be prosecuted saved lives after 9/11...
...There is no recognition on his part of the way in which the display of the flag after 9/11 was a means of expressing mutual solidarity among citizens who had just been violently attacked...
...Although many see a role for schools in promoting the solidarity of Americans under attack and in celebrating the democratic ethos of American society, parts of the academic left showed profound discomfort with expressions of patriotism...
...The Commemorating 9 /II Web site of the other national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, uses a much smaller number of carefully vetted links...
...But the public figures on the right who have mounted an intellectually dishonest attack on the NEA have made it necessary to start the national conversation over again...
...Pat Buchanan's comments that the United States brought the attacks on itself with its imperial ambition to act as world peacemaker and policeman, "night-sticking troublemakers" around the globe, surely fits into this category as does Robert Novak's claim that U.S...
...they failed to teach children Personal disclosure: for close to two decades, I have been a public school teacher and active teacher-unionist...
...The same spirit motivated teachers and paraprofessionals in the schools near Ground Zero to ensure that thousands of students were safely evacuated...
...What a powerful statement it is about the virtues of democracy in education that the grounded wisdom of everyday educators, rather than the ideological notions of the politically powerful and the academic elite, has produced the finest contributions on how to teach 9/11...
...My tongue-in-cheek reply to his weekly column, in which I was placed in the role of an "obscure desk jockey" in a teachers' union, can be read at: lists.cua.edu/scripts/wa.exe?A2=ind01108cL= arnl&T=0&O=A&P=30844...
...Readers will search the pages of the Finn collection in vain for even one critical mention of "blame America" sentiments on the right...
...In Chester Finn's collection of essays, 9/11: What Our Children Need To Know, Bennett declares that teachers should tell their students that what took place that day was "plainly and simply, evil...
...He noted that Finn's Fordham Foundation publication contained passages—for example, expressions of outrage at the Taliban's treatment of women and gays and appeals to the United States government not to persecute certain ethnic groups as it had persecuted Japanese-Americans during the Second World War—that certainly would have been criticized by the right if they had appeared on the NEA Web site...
...Evil is present only in the other, the evildoer, and there it becomes foreign, mysterious, almost incomprehensible...
...The Times had done a cut and paste job, not even marking cuts with ellipsis dots, making it appear that the plan instructed teachers to say that al-Qaeda was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks...
...Consequently, when it is time to move beyond the initial moral judgment to a deeper understanding of evil, Bennett's moral philosophy has limited value...
...Students could investigate the history of the flag as a national symbol and the idea that "the republic for which it stands" is a work in progress, with injustices to overcome as well as accomplishments to celebrate...
...And there are significant political and moral differences of judgment over this larger question...
...For example, the PBS America Responds Web site presents a lesson plan on the relevance of the treatment of Americans of Japanese and German descent during the Second World War...
...For Michael Apple, who supported Madison's attempt to evade the law and wrote about it in the Record, the flag and the anthem are unequivocal symbols of militarism and jingoism, of mindless war fervor and the silencing of dissent...
...Worse, the content of the lesson plan, which primarily addressed the psychological anxieties of school children, had been distorted beyond recognition...
...The result was predictable: the local newspapers ran banner headlines while angry Madisonians turned out in force at the board's meetings and compelled members to retract their anti-pledge and anti-anthem measure...
...In the days following, the Times printed three stories and two editorials supporting the claims of the original article...
...After 9/11, his name and his ethnicity become a cause for cruel taunts and bullying by his classmates...
...One of the ironies of the conservative attack on the NEA's Remember 9/11 Web site is that there are genuine manifestations of a "blame America" approach in the educational literature, but they have received scant attention compared to the falsely accused NEA...
...No mention either of Father Mychal Judge, the Catholic chaplain of the New York City Fire Department who gave his life as he brought spiritual aid to fallen comrades...
...The Internet columnist Matt Drudge, who made his name breaking the news about the most salacious details of the Monica Lewinksy scandal on his Web site, jumped into the fray, followed by nationally syndicated columnists Bill Cotterell, Linda Chavez, and Mona Charin...
...In the Record's special issue, this technique reaches an apogee of absurdity in a treatise by Kerry Burch dedicated to the notion that "Walker Lindh's transgressive love of the Taliban is a moment of high pedagogical importance...
...One of the editorials put forth what became the core contention of the conservative case against the NEA—but shorn of the first article's embarrassing far-right rhetoric...
...AS THE FIRST ANNIVERSARY Of September 11 approached, a controversy over the meaning of that fateful day and the place it will occupy in our national self-understanding irrupted into public view...
...With supportive commentary from Phyllis Schlafly and other figures of the far right, the Times set its sights on the NEAs Remember 9/11 Web site, created to help teachers prepare lessons for the anniversary...
...The first teaches a living patriotism, more concerned with democratic ideals than with the symbols that represent those ideals, more focused on engendering civic virtue than on venerating the rituals that express it or establishing a canon of political texts...
...With a meaningful definition of terrorism in hand, students can ask themselves some difficult questions about actions undertaken in the past by the United States and its allies, such as firebombing Dresden and dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Put the words "pedagogy of in front of whatever question is under study, and it becomes educational analysis...
...The NEA's Remember 9/11 was "a mishmash of pop-psychotherapeutics, feel-goodism, relativism and overblown multiculturalism," Finn opined...
...An equally powerful lesson would focus on the controversy over what to do with the site of the World Trade Center...
...They had "poisoned" the debate on how to teach 9/11...
...Where is that part of the lesson...
...Teaching Tolerance From the very first days following 9/11, there was widespread recognition among America's teachers of the importance of educating against the ethnic and religious stereotyping that would blame and seek revenge against Muslim Americans and Americans of Arabic and South Asian origins...
...In other essays and in the field of education more generally, the social and political analysis is a pale and inferior imitation of what takes place in the other disciplines of the social sciences...
...CAIR cites many incidents, including acts of violence and a small number of bias-related murders...
...Yet two of the contributors to his collection mention the importance of avoiding the errors of the internment...
...50 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 that "the root of the problem lay in Islamic teaching...
...It is the story of an Iraqi immigrant boy with the misfortune of having the name Osama...
...There was only one problem: there was no truth to the charges...
...It had been published on the Kennedy University's Web site, and the NEA Web site simply had a hyper-link to it, one of more than one hundred lesson plans so linked...
...The article accused the larger of the two national teacher unions, the National Education Association, of adopting a "blame America" approach to teaching about 9/11...
...In his essay 54 • DISSENT / Winter 2003 on "A Thoughtful Patriotism" (found on the 9/ 11 Web site of the National Council for Social Studies), Robert Stevens shows how a study of the artistic interpretations of the flag by Childe Hassam and Jasper Johns could be used for reflections of this sort...
...Students could find different musical interpretations, representing diverse cultural traditions: Duke Ellington's jazz interpretation, Rachmaninoff's classical recital, Gene Autry's country and western version, Charlie Daniels's bluegrass performance, Marvin Gaye's soulful rendition, Biz Markie's hip-hop translation, and the rock impressions of the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix...
...Facing History and Ourselves, an organization dedicated to education around issues of anti-Semitism, racism, and other forms of prejudice, has produced a Web site particularly rich in scholarly and other materials that can help teachers and students put the events of 9/11 into the instructional context outlined above...
...The CAIR 56 n DISSENT / Winter 2003 WEB SITES DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE American Federation of Teachers: Commemorating September 11 www.aft.org/news/91 l_anniv.html Educators for Social Responsibility: Teaching After 9/11 and the War in Afghanistan www.esrnational.org/ wtclessons.htm#anniversary Facing History and Ourselves: A Year Later: Considering the Legacies of September 11 www.facinghistory.org/facing/fhao2.nsf/a11/ September+11+Menu?opendocument Ford ham Foundation: September 11: What Our Children Need to Know www.edexcellence.net/Septl 1/ September11.html National Association of School Psychologists: One Year Later: A 9/11 Memorial www.nasponline.org/NEAT/911memorial.html National Council for Social Studies: Teachable Moments: September 11 www.socialstudies.org/resources/moments/ National Educational Association: Remember September 11 [The site now includes links to key documents from the controversy over its content.] www.neahin.org/programs/schoolsafety/ septemberll/materials/lessonhome.htm New York City Educators for Social Responsibility: Reflecting on September 11 www.esrmetro.org/reflectingon911.html Public Broadcasting System: America Responds www.pbs.org/americaresponds/educators.html Rethinking Schools: War, Terrorism and Our Classrooms www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/ sept11/ Teachers' College Record: Education and September 11 www.tcrecord.org/ Contentasp?ContentID=10997 Teaching Tolerance Program of the Southern Poverty Law Center: In Darkness Light www.tolerance.org/teach/current/ event.jsp?cid=367 report, American Muslims: One Year After 9/ 11, provides a far more nuanced and complex account than one would suspect from the TEACHING 9/11 Giroux and Davis texts...
...The pity of the campaign against the NEA is that we need a real national debate about teaching 9/11, a debate involving substantive differences on the issues and voices from across the political spectrum...
...There is much to value and much to criticize in this educational sub-genre...
...Consider, by contrast, the shameful way in which William Bennett obliterated Mark Bingham, who helped spearhead the charge on Flight 93's hijackers, from his account of that heroic effort in Why We Fight...
...support for Israel lies behind 9/11...
...The history of judicial rulings on the recitation of the pledge in public schools could be examined, providing students with a basis for understanding why a democratic society should not compel any citizen to utter an oath against his or her conscience, even an oath to democratic ideals...
...HOW DOES one provide students with a serious inquiry into the nature and context of the evil of 9/11...
...A lesson properly focused on defining terrorism, on distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate uses of violence, would be of great value in helping students understand why moral judgment must be passed on terrorist practices and why the war against the Taliban and al-Qaeda has an entirely different moral character...
...The debate emerged not as battling manifestos by prominent intellectuals or as dueling polemics in the leading political journals, but from a struggle over how 9/11 would be taught in the nation's public schools...
...Let the conservatives rail against such a pedagogy—it's a battle they cannot win...
...Rather, it is the narrow focus on that topic, to the exclusion of civics and history, that troubles him...
...not one text in that tradition is examined...
...Students could study other memorials (such as the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., and the AIDS quilts), read a number of the "Portraits of Grief' in the New York Times, and describe their ideas for an appropriate memorial...
...Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell claiming (on Falwell's 700 Club show) that 9/11 was an act of divine retribution by a God angry at America for "the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays" is only the best example of "blame America" from these quarters...
...His images—"we saw the face and felt the hand of evil"—might be striking, but you need to know more about your foes in order to defeat them...
...Patriotism in the Classroom Divisions in educational literature over the causes of 9/11 are even more pronounced in discussions of America's response...
...Through these projects, students would experience firsthand the civic virtue that lies at the heart of democratic patriotism...
...Similarly, in studying the evil of 9/11, students should investigate the historical context that produced al-Qaeda and similar organizations while noting parallel developments in other religious traditions...
...What is it that they came for...
...He works for the United Federation of Teachers in New York City...
...The conservative attacks on the NEA's Remember 9/11 were "intemperate," Rothstein concluded...
...While some citizens made the supreme sacrifice, many others found ways to express their solidarity with simple acts of kindness...
...Teaching tolerance is a recurring theme in every collection of 9/11 educational literature produced by classroom teachers and their organizations...
...At the end of the day, the worst that could be said about the NEA was that it demonstrated a lack of political savvy when it published a Web site with so many links that its opponents could use unfairly, and when it took so long to respond to the attacks upon it...
...But the fact of al-Qaeda's immediate and direct responsibility for the mass murders does not address DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 5 TEACHING 9/11 the larger question of what caused the group to act in that way...
...One finds not a hint of any of these developments in Giroux...
...And although many saw a role for schools in promoting the democratic values of tolerance and respect for cultural diversity—especially at a moment when Muslim Americans and Americans of Arabic and South Asian origin were in danger of being targeted by a backlash— the right continued to express discontent with such "multicultural" education...
...There is also historical amnesia with respect to, on the one hand, the embrace of the flag by the 1930s trade union movement and the 1960s civil rights movement, and, on the other hand, opposition to the flag's egalitarian symbolism by the diehard supporters of white supremacy who incorporated Confederate banners into many a state flag design...
...shores...
...After identifying the story as an example of what is wrong with post-9/11 DISSENT / Winter 2003 n 55 TEACHING 9/11 educational literature, Finn admits that there is nothing objectionable about the article's discussion of anti-Arab prejudice per se...
...With an understanding of the legitimate use of violence as laid out in just war theory, they could also wrestle with difficult questions concerning possible future actions of the United States, including the proposed invasion of Iraq...
...Of particular note are the following: a discussion that locates fundamentalist Islamist ideology in the context of religious extremism in many different faiths and cultures, an analysis of Osama bin Laden's appeals to the Arab and Islamic "street," and a presentation by the South African judge who headed up the Independent Inquiry on Kosova that places 9/11 in the context of escalating attacks on innocent civilians during wartime...
Vol. 50 • January 2003 • No. 1
