School textbooks present a biased picture of 9/11

All over the world, schoolchildren learn about the 9/11 attacks. There’s huge variation in what they learn, though.

You’d think it would be just the facts. These are history books, after all. But every history textbook has to choose what facts to emphasize and which to discard. You can’t tell every aspect of the story in the limited space a school textbook offers. Really, there are so many perspectives on 9/11 a whole course couldn’t fully cover them all. Most kids don’t get more than a quick lesson on the event.

So textbook authors choose what story to tell about 9/11. Whether they intend to or not, their lesson plans reflect the politics of the environment they’re writing in. From nation to nation, the history of 9/11 is being written in very different ways in different parts of the world.

The New York Times took a look at textbooks from around the world to see what kids learn about 9/11 in schools. What they found was a wide variation in how the history of 9/11 is taught.

In Pakistan, for example, 9/11 gets only a brief mention, which stresses Pakistani support for the U.S.-led War on Terror that followed. In India, there is an emphasis on bad behavior by U.S. forces. These differences, the NYT says, reflect the different political climates of the countries that produced these textbooks, and how they see themselves in relation to the United States:

American textbooks tend to focus on heroism and patriotism, the NYT tells us:

In the United States, most textbooks of the early 2000s portrayed the attacks as an occasion for patriotism and heroism — figuratively and literally — many using the Iwo Jima-like photograph of three firefighters raising a flag in the rubble of ground zero. That flag-raising, said Mary Ann Gundersen, an editorial director at Pearson, showed just what she wanted to capture: “resilience and defiance and hope and respect.”

But a decade later, American textbooks are starting to use more graphic images of a plane slamming into the twin towers and erupting into a fireball, or panic in the streets as New Yorkers fled the roiling dust cloud that followed the towers’ collapse.

U.S. textbooks tend to run long on emotional descriptions and short on facts. The NYT notes that over the past decade, textbooks have tended to elide specific details such as the number of firefighters killed, in favor of more general statements about the brutality of the attacks.

Textbook authors traditionally shy away from controversial topics, and there may be no topic in our recent history more controversial than the U.S. response to the 9/11 terror attacks. It’s no wonder American textbook authors would take a soft-focus lens to describing the events of the day, and particularly the civil liberties and foreign policy issues that came in its wake.

Some scholars worry, however, that American schoolchildren are being given too incomplete a picture of 9/11. One told the NYT:

“When you read the textbooks, it’s hard to make sense of why this happened,” Dr. Hess said. “There’s a pretty big void in the narrative.”

Of course, the history of 9/11 is still unfolding. While today marks the ten year anniversary of the attacks, the aftereffects are still very much the stuff of front-page news, not history books. It will be interesting to see what school textbooks have to say about 9/11 another decade from now, and a decade after that, as the impact becomes less present and more truly in the past.

Photo: Wesley Fryer

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