August
29, 2002, 9:00 a.m. Teaching
9/11
Finally,
a useful, patriotic teaching guide.
ews
recently broke that the National
Education Association has produced a September 11 curriculum for teachers
that is far from adequate or appropriate. As we note in the September
16 issue of National Review, "overall the mood is mildly adversarial
toward Americans, who are assumed to be constantly on the verge of committing
ethnic pogroms." It's an assumption that is "now widespread
among Americans who sincerely regard themselves as patriots."
The NEA — whose
guides are actually a compilation of guides from the likes of the Red
Cross and the National Association of School Psychologists and have been
applauded by the likes of the Council on American Islamic Relations —
is not the only one with bad post-9/11 (pre-, too, of course) lessons.
Stanley
Kurtz has written extensivelyabout some of the wrongheaded federally
funded anti-Americanism developed and distributed by the Middle Eastern
Studies Association (from whom he subsequently got significant grief —
no amateur lobby they) for use in K-12 classrooms; contributors include
such anti-American stars as Robert Fisk, Arundhati Roy, and Edward Said
(no Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, or Victor Davis Hanson here!).
Americans deserve
better — especially our kids. Well, move over NEA, and all the other
feeling-focused lesson plans. The
Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has an antidote for any anti-Americanism
— or at least mild hostility — you or your children might encounter.
It's called "September
11: What Our Children Need to Know."
Fordham (not associated
with the university) collected essays from 23 authors addressing the September
11 attack on the U.S. Rather than engaging in sentimentality or political
correctness, this teacher's (and parent's — what parent isn't a teacher,
too?) helper aims to begin to answer some real-life questions about "one
of the defining events of our age, of our nation's history and of [children's]
lives": "What happened? Why did it happen? How should we think
about it? What are we doing about it? What should we do about it?
How can we keep it from happening again?"
And rather than the
conventional post-9/11 approaches, the Fordham guide seeks to avoid what
others embrace: "blaming America," "simple disregard for
patriotism and democratic institutions," etc. Instead, Fordham embraces
freedom, democracy, and patriotism: "dealing in a realistic way with
the presence of evil, danger, and anti-Americanism in the world"
and "hail[ing] the heroism of those who have defended our land against
foreign aggressors — including those who perished on 9/11/01."
There's no pop psych
or self-esteem soothing in "What Our Children Need to Know."
But you will find useful academic content. While the Fordham report is
considerably smaller than the NEA curriculum, which fills up a website
of hundreds of screens, Fordham directs teachers to
a plethora of other sites and books for supplemental information, covering three general categories:
1) U.S. history and civics; 2) terrorism, the Middle East, and Islamic
history; 3) character development, autobiography, and historical fiction.
As Chester Finn,
president of the Fordham Foundation — and NR contributor —
told NRO, "The NEA's real sin is one of omission: their hundred-odd
lesson plans contain little real history, civics, heroism — or good
and evil. It's mainly about feelings. Our report contains lots of tough-minded
content: what schools really need to teach and children really need to
learn about September 11."
The scholars Fordham
has gathered include a lot of familiar faces lots of patriotic teachers
will feel comfortable with: Lynne Cheney, Bill Bennett, James Q. Wilson,
Clinton domestic-policy adviser Bill Galston, and our own Victor Davis
Hanson.
"We hope that
fair-minded and patriotic educators will use it, not just that one day,
but throughout the year — as a resource for lessons in civics, American
democracy, world and U.S. history, and character," Finn says. "We
may be David to the school establishment's Goliath — but in the end,
as I recall, David prevailed."
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