Using History to Teach about 9/11

James McGrath Morris

Like many high school teachers I had to teach a lesson to bewildered adolescents only hours after the terrorists brought down the World Trade Center and destroyed a portion of the Pentagon a few miles from my high school in northern Virginia. The planned lesson on Locke and Hobbes would wait for another day.

Since then, however, I have had an opportunity to consider at length what lessons one might teach regarding the events after the dust settles, the shock fades, and life--at least in high school--regains a sense of normalcy, where homecoming looms as large as the president's war on terrorism. I have come away from the experience with a strong sense of how much history instruction can help our nation's high school students cope with events such as what we lived through on September 11.

I also learned that deciding what will be taught to public school students regarding the history of an event that touches on ethnicity, religion, and nationalism issues is a highly contentious affair. Marc Bloch is often quoted for having said "history is written by the light of victor's campfire." When it comes to writing lesson plans, I discovered one can easily be scorched by the flames of politics.

The opportunity to do this work came through the conjunction of several things. First, I was asked to serve on an advisory panel and to develop a unit of study for a national project called 9/11 as History, launched by the Families and Work Institute (http://www.911AsHistory.org/) with funding from the Bank One Foundation. Second, I was also hired to develop lesson plans relating to 9/11 for WNET, in New York, and Now with Bill Moyers. The 9/11 as History project put me in touch with educators, teachers, and administrators from around the country and caused me to reflect extensively on how public school instruction should cope with September 11. I came face to face with the difficulty of this task while putting together a unit of study in which I teamed with Kathleen Anderson Steeves, associate professor of history education at the Graduate School of Education and Human Development, George Washington University, who has done considerable work in strengthening the teaching of history in secondary schools.

From the beginning, we decided that our approach would be to create lesson plans that would primarily use the study of history to help answer three overriding questions we found present among high school students: Why here? Why us? Why now? Our goal was not to provide ready answers but to show how history can be a natural portal through which one can explore answers to the troubling questions raised by the events such as the 9/11 attacks. We followed this approach because like most international conflicts, the root causes of 9/11 go far back in history and are themselves a lesson in how actions taken in the past affect us today, a concept frequently lost on high school students.

To many students, the collapse of the World Trade Center was like the sinking of the Titanic, a tragic event that occurred with the same randomness as the damage caused by a meandering iceberg. While it is true we are too close to the attack, chronologically speaking, to properly judge its place in history, we do know that it will be a central event in the formative years of young students in today's public schools. Like the actions of Neville Chamberlain, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the building of the Berlin Wall, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, the events of September 11 will have a profound effect in shaping this generation's world view. A solid grounding in history can help them see how the attacks are part of a bigger, unfolding story that dates back hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

In the first lesson, to discover "Why here?," students trace the similarities and difference among three major religions of Western history. The religions are mostly seen through their conflicts with each other, often leaving the students unable to perceive their similarities, such as the fact that all three religions revere Abraham and certain other patriarchs. This historic myopia weakens the students' ability to understand the attack of 9/11 because they are more likely see it in a simplistic manner. Complicating this view also raises their critical thinking skills and illustrates to students that the tapestry of history is more complicated and long-term than the standard texts would suggest.

Next, we ask the students to develop a series of visuals on how events in the present may be related to decisions in the past. In others words, "Why now?" They did this by creating displays on the conflicts connected to the contention between religions and their link to recent events. The events ranged widely, and included, among others, the Crusades, discovery of oil in the Middle East, Hitler's genocide, rise of radical Islam, and the Intifada. The objective here was to permit students to draw historical connections, seeing what we as historians see all the time, how one event may precipitate another many years later. High school students are rarely given this chance to speculate about these relationships prior to college and many, of course, never go on to a college-level class in history.

In a third lesson, students were asked to use historical knowledge to evaluate the media's portrayal of the attack as "unprecedented" by comparing it with other human-induced calamities involving Americans, including whether technological change in communications, transportation, and weaponry have made terrorism more likely. The events students analyze, among others, include the sinkings of the Maine and the Lusitania, Pearl Harbor, the Lockerbie bombing, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and the Oklahoma City bombing. This kind of evaluative work in history helps students to see a practical use for historical knowledge.

For further study, we created an opportunity for students to look at how images are used in shaping and commemorating seminal events in history. Students were asked to read the words of historians in the month following the attack and from journalists following three other major events in U.S. history. They undertook an examination of two famous images, the flag raising by Marines at Iwo Jima in 1945 and by firefighters in the rubble of the World Trade Center in 2001. The objective is to give students a chance to see how knowledge of history might provide perspective in understanding events of the present and how images may shape our remembrance of events.

On 11 September 2002, many high school teachers used these lessons and lessons like them. Over time, one presumes that they will become an integral part of the curriculum rather than special lesson plans brought out on a day of remembrance. One also hopes that history educators will remain in control of what lessons eventually survive. We published our lessons on the web at the same time the National Education Association was attacked for listing links to lessons that conservatives saw as unpatriotic. It may be that many well-intentioned people feel teaching "both sides" of this issue is inappropriate when the horror of the attack is so fresh, which is understandable. But the public debate also revealed that the ideological disputes of politics are never far from the classroom. Ominously, behind much of the criticism is the belief that teaching history should produce a particular result, namely patriotism and loyalty. Diane Ravitch made this argument in "Confessions of a flag-waver" in the September 2002 issue of The Education Gadfly, published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

In the end, if lessons about 9/11 are going to be added in a meaningful fashion to the curricula of high schools in coming years, educators will not only have to convince the public of what ought to be taught but how it should be taught. We must convince them that the point of history-based lessons is to empower students to make up their own minds about the meaning of the events. After all, creating citizens who are skilled in democratic decision-making is what differentiates us from our attackers.

James McGrath Morris is a member of the social studies department of West Springfield High School, Springfield, Virginia, and an author. He is currently at work on a biography of a turn-of-the-century New York journalist to be published by Fordham University Press in 2003.