Letter from the Editorial Board

The High School Journal is pleased to present its Fall 2011 Special Issue commemorating the tenth anniversary of September 11th. While the entire Editorial Board was involved in choosing the topic for this Special Issue--Education in the Post 9/11 Era--this subject is particularly cogent for me, as I am currently researching the discourses of 9/11. Addressing the issue of September 11th's effects on education carries more complexity than is at first apparent. Commonplace in our narrative is the claim that 9/11 "changed everything," but many of the effects educators would point to in the last decade--standardized and corporatized schooling, xenophobia and anti-multiculturalism, increased segregation and stratification--can all find their roots in policy and cultures formed in earlier decades. (Consider that No Child Left Behind was proposed in January of 2001, a product of movements pushed in the 1990s.) So perhaps 9/11 did not "change everything" so much as it changed how we speak of everything. A friend recalls telling her AP US History class on September 11th, 2001, "This is your Pearl Harbor. This is your Kennedy assassination. You will always remember where you were, how you felt, on this day." Pearl Harbor does seem to bear many similarities to 9/11 (and is discussed in comparison in a few articles in this issue), from the attack on US soil to the xenophobia against an immigrant population. And yet, a historical (and technological) contextualization highlights major differences that separate the two--and directly impacts the conversation about education, September 11th has been inculcated into the curriculum discourse in ways that Pearl Harbor never was. Stoddard, Hess, and Hammer (2011) identify the difficulties of writing "first-draft history"--history that is happening as it is being recorded--in textbooks. Due to the length of time it previously took to publish school curricula, Pearl Harbor was not taught as an event until long after World War II ended. Analysis was done in the luxury of hindsight; we knew what the outcome of the aftershocks of Pearl Harbor were and could evaluate accordingly. September 11th, conversely, took place in an age of instant information. CNN, Fox News, The New York Times, Mother Jones, MSNBC, our own president--all rushed to fill the media market by analyzing 9/11 as it happened, creating an event that carried a legacy before the ramifications could be absorbed. Returning to the teacher's comment--"You will always remember..."--it is as if we sought to signify the value of 9/11 as it occurred rather than waiting to see what the effects would be. And thus, an immediate association was made between 9/11 and ... what? It all depended on whom we were listening to. Slattery and Rapp (2003), writing in the weeks after 9/11, "believe[d] that the global community is on the threshold of an opportunity to heal divisions and nurture peace, but we are also mired in the rhetoric and reality of escalating conflict, cycles of vengeance and retaliation, and potential global annihilation" (p. 229). Some associated 9/11 with the rhetoric of President Bush and the PATRIOT Act, building an instantaneous readiness for war and revenge, altering the political discursive direction (Wayne Journell analyzes this change in direction in, "The Challenge of Political Instruction in a Post-9/11 United States"). Others sought to heal the cultural riffs they saw as having been created by the United States and brought into sharp focus by the attacks (Rachel Jones discusses one method in, "Intolerable Intolerance: Toxic Xenophobia and Pedagogy of Resistance"). High School curriculum sought to quickly catch up from both sides. The US Department of Homeland Security published a curriculum confirming its own 9/11 narrative, echoed in most secondary school textbooks. Opposing viewpoint materials arrived as well, including Brown University's Choices Curriculum, which published the curriculum Responding to Terrorism: Challenges for Democracy (now in its seventh edition only nine years later) and Protest, Revolution, & Change. …