Will they call it "The tragedy of 9/11" or what it was, a Terrorist Attack?

And from the story (as a NJ.com commenter wrote), are they creating a moral equivalency between the Boston Tea Party, Birmingham and 9/11?

Instead of drilling code words and scare tactics into our kids' heads, we should be teaching them how to think critically, how to solve problems as opposed to rote memorization.

Sadly, the terroristic piece of shit that is called the No Child Left Behind Act emphasizes the latter and not the former, penalizing smart students who actually want to learn by sucking up the teacher resources to teach the idiot kids how to memorize stuff so the school can meet the NCLB requirements.

If the dumb kids don't want to learn there will always be plenty of fast food jobs in the service industry for them. And if they don't want that, there's always manual labor jobs like landscaping.

If anyone read the article in the Ledger, there was some discussion about how to teach the 'why' from the persepective of the hijackers. I recycled and can't quote it but it angered me. The WHY?????? I'd like my children to be taught that they were psychotic religious extremests and not have them search for some deep, political cause!

Ugh hans,

So ALL of NCLB is bad?

What about the part that exposes the horrible job schools do at teaching Black and minority kids?

Was the old- no accountability way of "educating" kids better?

And remember the question to ask when one teaches to the test is: what's the test?

Some tests, I wouldn't mind having kids taught to.

So while it's fashionable to beat up on NCLB (who wrongly act like this is another Bush folly when it was co-sponsored and co-created by Ted Kennedy), remember, accountability is not a bad thing when you're doing a good job.

Unfortunately, and even here in Montclair, our teachers and schools fail our children.

NCLB has exposed many.

(Unless you're the Obama's and can afford private school for your kids, as poor folks have to get by with bad schools-- that spend as much as private schools....)

Good history is delivered with a Machiavellian brutality. An unvarnished history is the only history worth reading.

The issue is not private versus public schools. There are many public schools -- quite a few in this area -- that are every bit as good as prestigious private schools, and there are private and parochial schools that are not good at all.
In affluent towns, the public schools are almost invariably good, and studenst there do quite well. however, the urban schools are not getting it done, and even in good schools in affluent areas, some kids are not having the same experience as their peers.
The problem I have with NCLB is not accountability per se, as much as it is the punitive focus of the law, as well as the structure and content of the tests themselves. By all means schools should be accountable, but these tests don't measure a great deal of what really constitutes a good education.

Almost 3000 people were killed and you never asked why HIB-ville? I assure you that's the first question a kid would ask. And "because terrorists hate America" is not really a sufficient answer.

"If anyone read the article in the Ledger, there was some discussion about how to teach the 'why' from the persepective of the hijackers. I recycled and can't quote it but it angered me. The WHY?????? I'd like my children to be taught that they were psychotic religious extremests and not have them search for some deep, political cause!"

I'm with you, Hidden.

No, Pete, they should be taught about religious extremism not that they hated America. I thought I was clear on that, at least Martta got it!

Yes, that's exactly how I read it. Kids need to be taught that terrorism has always been a force in the world, since the dawn of time. (Age appropriate lessons, of course). Maybe generations to come will figure out to deal with it effectively. But before you learn how to deal with something, you must acknowledge that it exists.

kids should be taught that religion is intrinsically ignorant and leads to hate and violence.

If you are going to teach about terrorism, be thorough and look from multiple view points. Include other topics that have impacted the US - like sympathy and support from US citizens for organizations like the Irish Republican Army (via groups such as NORAID.)

Certainly, teaching multiple perspectives should be encouraged, if not required. The problem is the Bush administration and the callow mainstream media jumped on the play-the-victim bandwagon and invaded the wrong country based on ill-conceived information and questionable motives. Sadly, this perspective will likely never be taught to our children.

I was on a plane a week after 9/11 and people were like, "How could you? Aren't you scared?" My response was, "Grow up, it was a tragic event, yes, but I'm not going to let it stop me from living my life."

It's sad that 7+ years later we've got 9/11 widows abusing the media and trying to tell us what and how our kids should educated.

What about this perspective: I wonder how much of the 9/11 millions Mrs. Salamone is willing to donate to her local schools and on what conditions? I'm sure Mrs. Salamone does not have to worry about financial stability or her mortgage.

Spicoli, I have no love for the IRA. I've seen first hand how they operate. But they didn't arise from a vacuum, and part of the reason that they were successful for as long as they were is because many in Britain insisted on seeing them as one-dimensional fanatics who simply loved to murder people for the fun of it.
Neither did these Islamist terrorists arise from a vacuum. Their world view is, in my opinion, totally skewed. They cannot be, in my opinion, negotiated with. They must be destroyed, period.
But it would be a mistake to fail to study their motives. Had we in the West done so before 9/11, we might have been more alert to the danger and many of the safeguards we now have in place to prevent terrorist attacks might have been in place sooner. Understanding what motivates one's enemy is not the same as excusing it or condoning it. It is rather step one in self-protection. The West does not need to change any policy in response to Islamist grievances if, once examined, the West deems those policies to be in their own interests. But being aware that continuance of those policies will expose us to risk is vital, so that we can better protect against that risk.
Its too easy to dismiss our enemies as nuts or monsters. That is, after all, what they do with us.

Obviously, this issue opens a box of complex tangents that are all unresolved. If religion is a central theme, though, it might be tricky having discussions about religious hatred/violence/terrorism in public schools.

Maybe a better solution is to incorporate analysis and dialog into a "modern history" curriculum. A discussion about strategic warfare and the role technology plays might remove some of the hot-button emotions associated with 9/11 while also offering solutions for living in our contemporary world (i.e. the military does employ chaplains to counsel soldiers on the battlefield ... a segueway to describe a positive role of religion in our lives).

I am not picking on the IRA. Just making a point that depending on the lens, people can have very different views on terrorism, and their are many (including US citizens) who could rationalize support for something so abhorrent.

"there are many"

hans,

You embarrass yourself with your comments about Mrs. Salamone.

I'm sure she'd give up everything to have one more moment with her husband.

For you to think, let alone write what you did was despicable.

My 2 cents is that we should refer to the 9/11 casualties as murder victims. I'm tired of all of the PC and wordsmithing...the people on the planes and in the buildings were murdered. They didn't perish, they didn't just die in a plane accident, they didn't just die in a building collapse...they were murdered.

And this one is for Sleepyseek...I proudly practice my Roman Catholic faith.

The active membership of NorAid was fairly small, Spicoli, mainly restricted to the New England and Atlantic Seaboard states (with an odd stop in Butte, MT). Its support of the IRA was basically but a footnote to history; Libyan backing seems to have been far more important. And even in books written by Irish writers, the support for the "lads" by such groups here as Clan na Gael and the Fenian Brotherhood never seems to have been terribly substantial (the original backing for John Holland's subrmarine and Joseph McGarrity's career here notwithstanding)in the long run. So much of it, too, has to do with the romanticization of the American Irish over here with how they think it used to be and should be over there. John Ford's movies often get at this, as does reading either Edwin O'Connor's or James T. Farrell's novels. So the question then becomes, how far back and in how much detail do you really want to go on this one?

While I agree with thee, croiagusnam, that some understanding of the roots of the Irish "Troubles" is nonetheless quite useful, I'd also appreciate in tandem with it (should it happen) an examination of the policies of the Catholic Church in Ireland which contributed so to faith-based violence and misunderstanding there (have you read Marcus Tanner's great books on both Celtic Christianity in Ireland and on the survival in general of Celtic culture?). To study such matters is to understand, as I'm sure you'll agree, that the IRA has hardly always stood totally for "virtue" and that even Reverend Paisley's supporters have a case worth weighing. (I also feel, croiagusanam, that here on Baristanet we're just talking to each other on this area, that few if any others would ever quite grasp what we're on about.)

The danger of a 9/11 curriculum is how many voices will insist on their input. To thus control the material. Islam in general, for example, rather stoutly wishes to deny consideration of the faith's repulsive-to-many-others views on marriage, divorce, justice, the enforcement of domestic tranquility and even the Prophet's own exceedingly curious history, which includes possible child molestation and certainly an appetite for chastisement of his enemies which might even have horrified someone like Himmler. Yet this as much as anything has led to today's current muddle.

Then there are the views of Ward Churchill and his supporters, which view 9/11 victims, famously, as "little Eichmanns" who merely got their just desserts that day either as representatives of US policy or of capitalism in general.

Then, perhaps even worse, there are the views of those like the demented lasertwerp (and other self-styled "progressives"). Such views are definitely never expressed with anything approaching either coherence or respect for political and grammatical reality.

Many cooks will thus spoil the broth that spills over the teaching of what happened on 9/11.

Hansi, you just sound base-natured above with your speculation on what Ms. Salamone should do with her insurance monies and so forth. Your willingness to grab at the moral anus (where so much of laserboy's opinions already reside covered in feces) in your posts woukd test even the famously supposedly tolerant attitude towards free speech of that noted court toady Voltaire.

And doesn't our very own laserfool sound quite Spenglerian, or even Hobbesian, in his own stupendously knuckleheaded way today?

Lastly for this skein, a marvelous exchange from Thackeray's "Barry Lyndon," which the movie of course did not include: an Irish recruit to a British regiment tells his NCO that he should in no sense be "treated this way," as he's descended from the high kings of Ireland.

And the sergeant sensibly replies that he's never met an Irishman yet was wasn't descended from those fabled high kings.

Oh I think the Provos moved very quickly from whatever "virtue" they may have possessed directly to thuggery, cathar. But they answered a "need", if you will. The community received no justice from the entrencehed powers nor from the Brits. The table was set and the Provos sat down to it.
Even within the nationalist community however, support for things like Omagh and other "operations" was never great. As Synge said, there is a great difference between a grand story and a dirty deed.
For sure the loyalists have a point -- they've been in Ireland far longer than most Americans have been in the US. Unless their name is Red Cloud.

Or even as long here as "Kennewick Man," croiagusanam.

I was once impressed by some (only some, I caution)of the tactics employed by the Officials. Rent strikes, religious outreach, some other stuff, it all struck me as the seeds for a genuine left-wing populist movement, one James Connolly might even have nodded to.

But just like PIRA, they insisted on killing people as well.