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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."