How do today’s students learn about 9/11?
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MARTINSBURG – Twenty-five years after the Sept. 11 attacks, students in West Virginia are still required to study the events and what followed, as more and more students have no personal memory of that day.
West Virginia’s social studies standards specifically mention the 2001 attacks in the sixth-grade and eighth-grade curriculum. In these classes, students look at 9/11 as a major historical event and learn about how Americans responded to it. The standards also tell students to study terrorism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how the United States responded to conflicts in the Middle East.
By high school, the focus shifts to the long-term effects of the attacks. Students are expected to analyze terrorism before and after 9/11, look into the causes and results of the events leading up to the attacks, and think about America’s role in the world since 2001.
This includes learning about events like the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the Iran hostage crisis. Students also evaluate how effective the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were and discuss whether the restrictions on civil liberties under the Patriot Act were necessary.
Because of this curriculum, students encounter 9/11 several times during their school years. For many of them, though, the attacks are not something they remember firsthand; instead, they are something they have only heard about in class.
“They show us a lot of footage, and it can be hard to watch,” said one eighth grader at Martinsburg South Middle School. “They teach it every single year, and people are desensitized to it.”
She said she started learning about the attacks in fourth or fifth grade, usually in history or social studies classes.
That distance between generations is one of the challenges teachers face when talking about an event that is still a vivid memory for many adults.
“If they don’t have any direct connection, it’s just history to them,” said Angela Kuntz, a history teacher at Musselman Middle School. “To some of them, it’s just one more thing that happened in history.”
Kuntz compared how students view 9/11 to the way many students understand the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. They can see these events as tragedies, she said, but still struggle to fully grasp what it was like to live through them.
For teachers who experienced Sept. 11 themselves, that gap can make teaching the topic especially challenging.
“That’s one of the challenges of being a teacher,” said James Valdesalice, a civics teacher at Musselman High School in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle. “A lot of the kids now weren’t born yet.”
Valdesalice said his way of teaching the topic has changed as his students have changed. He uses a U.S. Citizenship test to see what students already know before shaping his lessons around their knowledge.
Students also write reflectively about the attacks.
The challenge, according to Valdesalice and Kuntz, is not just teaching students what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. It is helping them understand the world that existed before the attacks, the response that followed, and how those decisions still shape the country.
For students who have grown up only in the post-9/11 era, those effects are simply part of the world they have always known.
Twenty-five years later, 9/11 is still a defining event for those who lived through it. For a generation born after, it is becoming something else: a piece of history they are expected to understand, even though they can never remember living through it.