How local schools are teaching kids about 9/11
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The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are passing from memory into history in America's classrooms.
Why it matters: Twenty-five years later, 9/11 is becoming more like Pearl Harbor or the Challenger disaster — a defining event younger generations know only as dates on a calendar or entries in a textbook.
Zoom out: Ohio doesn't require schools to teach about 9/11, leaving curriculum decisions to schools and districts.
- But the state offers materials for high school U.S. history classes on the political, national security, economic and foreign policy challenges that followed the attacks.
Zoom in: Mason gives teachers resources to make that history relevant locally for the district's more than 10,000 students.
- That includes a video featuring first responders, military members, educators and people connected to Wendy Faulkner, a Mason mother killed at the World Trade Center.
- Filmed in 2021, the video also features Muslim community members — important context in a district where about 35% of students are Asian and there is a significant Muslim population.
What they're saying: "We have the important responsibility as educators to help students understand what happened, remember the people whose lives were lost, and understand how the attacks and their aftermath affected people in our own Mason community," Mason City Schools spokesperson Tracey Carson tells Axios.
- Lessons can address the courage and unity after the attacks alongside the fear and discrimination directed at Muslim Americans, Carson says.
Meanwhile, Catholic schools teach the attacks and their aftermath through a faith-based lens, says Becky Schulte, who handles communications for schools operated by the Archdiocese of Cincinnati.
- Younger students might learn about first responders and helping others, while older students may explore the War on Terror and Islamophobia through themes of suffering, human dignity, compassion and forgiveness.
The archdiocese oversees 111 schools from downtown Cincinnati to the Dayton area, including St. Susanna in Mason, St. Francis de Sales in Lebanon and St. Margaret of York in Loveland.
- With each school and grade taking its own approach, there will likely be "111 different ways to talk about it, and then for each grade as well," Schulte says.
- "It's history, but it's also a human and moral lesson for our kids."