Dyson College of Arts and Sciences
Issue link: http://dysoncollege.uberflip.com/i/128987
Moran and Socol (2011), in their article entitled, Why September 11, 2001 Must be in Our Classrooms, support these ideas in suggesting that: Our students cannot continue to learn history simply by recalling dates and names of leaders. That form of sanitized school history has too often produced a public unable to critique politically motivated revisions of history. It is also not enough to present "two sides to a story." Rather, our students must learn how to look deeply and critically into multidimensional stories that are the building blocks of our shared understanding of history. Learners who realize that history occurs chronologically but is best understood conceptually become historians for a lifetime. They are intrigued by the connections and relationships of historic events and realize there's more to history than dates, places, and names in a book or on a test. They seek history's stories and pass those stories on to the next generation. They learn that history emerges from the people who populate these stories and is brought forward by those who document and tell those stories. They ask questions. We must engage our young people in the construction of history. In this century, we are all historians, researching, comprehending, assembling, reporting, and storytelling. Have we, as Page and Sosniack (2002) suggest, "moved on" and "put September 11 behind us", or have we as a nation again exhibited the speedy amnesia for which it is justly known? As some have mused, maybe September 11 has now had its "15 minutes of fame" and we are loathe to grapple effectively with its sobering and controversial lessons? Keeping the spirit and lessons of the 9/11 tragedy as a key turning point in our history reminds us of our strengths and weaknesses as a society. It provides the unique opportunity to celebrate our heroes and explore the contributions of our public servants who, for an all too short moment in our experience, captured the attention, admiration, and support of the entire nation. Every day, public servants long taken for granted became visible as we allowed ourselves to appreciate the dignity, unselfishness and critical roles they played. Teaching about 9/11 allows us to periodically rekindle those feelings and celebrate the best characteristics of a democratic society. As Blacker (2002) so eloquently concludes: …the deeds of September 11th's public servants clearly reveal something about the nature of public service, something of which we are all-too rarely aware. Beneath the mountains of rules and regulations, the paperwork, the bureaucracy, the incessant managerial "reform" schemes, the budgetary wrangling, even the political controversies, there persists a moral nobility inherent in public service—in those "job descriptions" and, even more, in the spirit and traditions behind those jobs. But September 11, I think, alters much of this dynamic. Almost overnight it helps to correct this lack of vision, this myopia that causes us to miss much of what is so close at hand. September 11 also heightens the urgency with which we need to understand with greater depth and clarity those I've been calling the people in our neighborhood that class of public servants, including teachers, lionized in children's books and then afterwards largely ignored in democratic theory. This is a strange and regrettable amnesia, for these full-time public servants are indispensable to any realizable contemporary democracy. If Disaster Strikes, Are the Public Schools Ready to Work Together to Rebuild and Recover? "…The readiness is all." (Hamlet, VII, 234-237) Without question, schools are uniquely prepared to respond in a decisive and coordinated fashion to any possible disaster from natural or man-made causes. One 71