Editorial Epilogue: Education after September 11

It was, I believe, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard who noted that "a single catastrophic event of monumental import is enough to call things into question ever after." If we are to take this pronouncement to heart, we must do much more than state the obvious when we speak about the tragedy of September 11. Yes, the world has changed. But I realize now that the very way in which this phrase has been repeated over and over again deadens our understanding of it and fosters a cultural loss of memory that extends beyond the problem so easy to identify in our students: a lack of a sense of history. The assumption is that, in light of this national tragedy, the words speak for themselves. Initially, of course, they did. But without reflection, without context, without memory, the further we are removed from the event itself, the more these words become a passive observation of what we know, what we have always known to be true: when tragedy happens, we are forever altered. Most of the changes that come to mind when we hear this phrase have to do with a sobering of spirit-certainly with interruptions to our way of life-regarding the assumptions that we make about travel, and about trust. The question is how do we reflect on and learn from September 11 in a way that will allow us to fundamentally redirect how we live, think, and teach? Can we begin to imagine a response, a change so powerful that each and every social institution is permeated with new courage? The courage to look into the suffering we have met as well as that which we ourselves inflict-not only as a nation, but as a member of this race of human beings, fraught as we are with our prejudices, our fanatacisms, our fear, our greed? How do we begin to actualize and make visible the deeper changes that I believe Kierkegaard is referring to, changes born out of our conscious commitment to the "never again" that we so bravely hold to in the aftermath of grief? The truth is, the world is always different when violence of unprecedented magnitude is wrought. Did the world not change after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Vietnam? Was this nation not permanently altered after the assassinations of our presidents, of our political and social leaders? Is it enough to say the world has changed-we have changed-without wanting to know what, if anything, sets one tragedy apart from the suffering of countless numbers throughout history? What, beyond the personal experience of it, makes it ours? I do not mean to suggest that there is nothing unique about what happened with September 11, nor to diminish the personal loss and meaning of each life, of each family, of this country. But when, as an educator, I bemoan the lack of historical memory of my students, I must ask, where is our memory as a society, as a culture? Where is the evidence that we have made fundamental changes to our social-particularly our educational - institutions as a result of any of these tragic events of history? Now, three years since the attacks on the World Trade Center, I wonder: What has changed for our students, for us? Beyond our reactions, which include heightened vigilance, renewed patriotic fervor, a rush to engage our students in civic responsibility, a terrifying kind of knowing that anything can happen, even here in the United States-beyond all of this, what has changed substantively in the choices we make, the politics we play, the truths we teach? It is interesting that when things go wrong, we turn to our educational institutions to see what we can do differently, and well we should. We look to them too because we know that how we educate today will determine who we will become tomorrow. We look to our schools because we understand that, counter to the view that education is about facts, objective truths of knowledge, and better jobs, our schools are always fundamentally about values, about what is important to know and to become as human beings. Far from the myth of objective facts, we know that our curriculum is very much a value-informed and political issue. …