September 11, 2026, marks 25 years since al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four commercial airliners and murdered nearly 3,000 innocent people in the deadliest terrorist attack in American history.
A generation of students has grown up with no memory of that day. What they understand about it depends on what we choose to teach them. Judging by some of the materials available, Americans should be concerned.
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One of the nation’s most elite schools of education—the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education—created “Teaching Beyond 9/11,” a “multimodal curriculum for high school and college educators,” whose title suggests a comprehensive treatment of the events. But its lessons devote only a paragraph to the attacks themselves. It says that the United States merely “accused” Osama bin Laden of masterminding them. It does not explain al-Qaeda’s responsibility or the Taliban’s role in sheltering the group.
Meantime, the curriculum presents over 50 lessons about Islamophobia, racism, American power, and “social justice.” Students are encouraged to adopt political interpretations of the attacks and their aftermath and asked to identify “avenues for solidarity,” imagine “better futures,” and become motivated to act for social change. The curriculum includes a unit on “right-wing extremism” but offers no examination of Islamist extremism—the ideology that motivated the attack on America.
This curriculum is promoted by NYC Public Schools, national education organizations, and state education departments in Oregon, Massachusetts, and Wisconsin, where it is recommended for middle school students. A quarter-century after 9/11, we are in danger of teaching young people more about America’s mistakes than about those who attacked us and what they believe.
My own memory is clear as the blue sky that morning. I was home with a new baby and a toddler when my mother called and told me to turn on the TV. A plane had just struck the World Trade Center. My first thought was that a sightseeing pilot had gotten too close. John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane had gone down two years earlier, and I assumed that a similar terrible accident had occurred. Then the second plane hit the South Tower, and the sickening realization set in: we were under attack.
My husband worked in the World Financial Center across the street from the towers. After the first plane hit, I begged him to leave. He assured me that everyone in his building was fine. When the second plane hit, we lost communication as desperate families overwhelmed cell phone and pager services.
He eventually made it home safely. But he could not shake the memory of staring up at the towers before they fell—and seeing thousands of sheets of paper fluttering in the air and people jumping to their deaths. The months that followed were filled with shock, devastation, and mourning. We learned of strangers who helped others escape the burning towers. An immediate sense of patriotism emerged; flags appeared everywhere. People gave blood, volunteered, and raised money for the families of the dead.
The country knew exactly who had attacked us and why. There was no doubt that the terrorists chose not just high-casualty targets, but symbols of American commerce, prosperity, and freedom. They were adherents of an extreme Islamist ideology profoundly hostile to pluralism, religious liberty, democratic government, and the secular freedoms that Americans take for granted.
We were told repeatedly, as though to explain the devastation and help ensure another attack would never happen, that our nation had suffered a “failure of the imagination”—we hadn’t taken precautions that we could have taken. Separated by an ocean from the world’s most violent conflicts, we didn’t think we were vulnerable.
Today, every child sitting in a classroom deserves to understand the truth of what happened on 9/11—who attacked us, and why. We fail to provide it at our peril.
The attacks should be taught as an expression of an extremist political ideology that aims to destroy the United States and threatens freedom around the world. Students also need to understand what terrorism means. Extremists and their sympathizers increasingly describe terrorism as mere political “resistance,” as though the two terms were interchangeable. They are not.
Terrorism is the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians to achieve a political, ideological, or religious objective. Students should understand the moral difference between those who deliberately target civilians and those acting to defend people from such attacks.
Unfortunately, the Penn curriculum is only one example of curricula that downplay 9/11 history. A North American Values Institute (NAVI) review of other materials found a pattern of activist framing of the terrorist attacks that leaves children ignorant of the ideological forces that drove the attackers and steers them toward activism instead of understanding. One teaching guide, promoted by the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, encourages students to blame U.S. policy for 9/11—for example, by asking “why some people hate the U.S. enough to kill thousands of people.” In a lesson on the American Federation of Teachers’ “Share My Lesson” platform, students read Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America” uncritically and are asked only to summarize his arguments and find reasons for his anti-Semitism: “Why do you think Osama bin Laden hates Jews so much?”
Dangers to our free society still abound. We’re more aware today than we were back then about perils from abroad. But we need to be clear-eyed about the threats at home, too, especially when our educational institutions are willing to distort history for ideological purposes.
We can no longer safely assume that the truth of what happened on September 11 and why it matters will make its way into American classrooms. Twenty-five years later, it’s up to us to ensure that we don’t suffer another failure of imagination.