What Lessons of 9/11 for our Children?

One of the most difficult decisions that a homeschooler undertakes is what to teach their children. A part of this is what curricula to use and how to adapt it, and what supplementary texts and materials to use, and how much to use events like trips as educational fora as opposed to making them a kind of escape. But above everything else, the hardest part is figuring out what your goal is.

Simply being "educated" is insufficiently descriptive to form choices around. After all, a child who knows everything about pornography can be said to be educated in that subject, and I don't know of anyone who thinks that is an appropriate educational subject for, say, 13- and 14-year olds. In order to make choices about what subjects, and to what degree, you will educate your children on, you have to have a specific defined goal. For us, it is to give our children the tools, background and knowledge necessary to be productive citizens of a free Republic.

If you ask any given parent of a child in government schools, they would likely list job preparation, preparation for college, preparation for being a good citizen and the like. Even though the schools themselves have been trending more and more towards social activism and pop psychology, many teachers apparently still teach to goals more similar to those of the public at large.

Teachers' ability to teach to those goals, however, is more limited than that of a homeschooling family. The reason for this is that teachers by and large cannot choose which curriculum they will use, and in many cases cannot even choose how to apply it. These decisions are made by school administrators, school boards (and increasingly by State and Federal school bureaucracies). Inevitably, this reduces the ability of teachers to decide what to teach.

Given all this, what are teachers to teach about 9/11? Something must be taught, particularly in social studies (the modern substitute for history, geography, acculturation and civics) and particularly to students who have a very firm memory of the actual events. To the extent that we discuss those events with our children (particularly our eldest, who is seven), we focus on the horror of the attacks; the necessity to prevent their recurrence by actively waging war on the people who committed the attacks, those who supported them, and those who provide the ground for raising up new groups to attack us; the bravery of the rescue workers and the passengers of Flight 93; and the necessity of pre-planning for disasters. At least, I hope we are able to teach those things over time, in such a way that they will stick in the children's heads.

Apparently, some school administrators think that the best thing to teach about 9/11 is ... nothing at all. What's really annoying about this is the lurking suspicion that the same administrators trying to slip the horror of 9/11 down the memory hole are simultaneously (if in different contexts) telling students that they are unique, and therefore should have high self-esteem (regardless of merit), but they should also examine the reasons the terrorists hate them, because as Americans they must have done something wrong.

Yes, I know I'm reading an ideology into this that might not be there, and certainly that is not explicitly stated in the story, but I'm having a really hard time picturing an administrator pulling this kind of crap without also sharing the rest of the Leftist ideological basket. Drink the Kool-Aid, and it'll all be OK.

Maybe I should be more charitable, and assume that the administrator is so feckless, gutless and unimaginative that she simply feels anything stronger than pablum is "risky." Or maybe it's too late and I'm too grumpy.

Posted by Jeff at September 15, 2003 10:54 PM | Link Cosmos