For today’s students, 9/11 is history, not a lived experience. As educators mark the 25th anniversary, they should focus less on recreating the tragedy and more on helping students understand its causes, consequences and lasting impact.
Our students today were not alive when the twin towers of the World Trade Center fell. They didn’t watch the images live on television or feel the fear and uncertainty that so many of us adults remember. For them, September 11 is ancient history. And as an educator, I believe the first question we should ask ourselves when teaching about a historical event is: why are we teaching this?
When the subject of the story is a traumatic event, our instinct can sometimes be to make students feel the tragedy, show the pictures, tell the stories, and emphasize the devastation. Our students today are already surrounded by trauma; they experience wars, shootings, natural disasters, and violence through social media and news, often before an adult has a chance to help them understand what they are seeing.
Teaching about 9/11 should not be about recreating the trauma adults experienced. It’s about giving students the historical context they need to understand what happened, how the country responded, and how those choices continue to shape their lives.
The goal is not to give younger people a watered-down version of the story and give older people the real story. Instead, we can adjust the complexity of questions, the amount of context, and the sources we ask students to engage with based on their developmental level.
The goal of 9/11 education should be to help young people understand the world that 9/11 helped create.
For young children, this may involve explaining in simple terms what happened, acknowledging that many people were hurt and killed, and giving them space to ask questions and express their feelings. There is no need to overwhelm them with graphic images or details that they may not be developmentally ready to process.
As students get older, teachers can introduce more complex historical questions: What led to the attacks? Who was responsible? How did the United States react, particularly during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? How did 9/11 change airport security, surveillance, and civil liberties debates?
Teachers can also examine consequences that are often left out of conversations about 9/11: What happened to Muslim, Arab, and South Asian Americans in the years that followed? How has Islamophobia shaped people’s experiences? How did the September 11 attacks influence American foreign policy, immigration, and ideas about national security?
For parents, the same principle applies. Children may have questions after seeing a story about the 9/11 anniversary, a social media post, or images on television. Start with what they already know and what they are actually asking for. Answer honestly, correct misinformation, and don’t throw in scary details just because they’re available. With older children, help them make connections between the event and the world they know today.
Adults should also recognize that our memories of 9/11 belong to our generation. I was a primary school student when it happened. I remember watching the news on television and my mother would keep my sisters and me home from school because she was worried that my small elementary school in Sacramento would be the next target. I remember the fear and confusion I felt. These memories are important, but children who weren’t alive at the time don’t need us to recreate our experience for them. They need the opportunity to develop their own understanding of history.
This distinction is particularly important when we talk about emotion processing. We don’t need to manufacture an emotional response for students to care. Understanding can lead to empathy, and context can pave the way for meaningful thinking.
History is more than a collection of tragedies that students are expected to memorize. History should help us understand: how did we get here? What forces and factors have shaped the world we live in? Who was/is affected? And how? What choices were made? What consequences followed? And why is it still important today?
The goal of 9/11 education should be to help young people understand the world that 9/11 helped create. Twenty-five years later, we can honor those who died, acknowledge their grief, and recognize the profound impact of the attacks without turning the classroom into another source of trauma. We can help young people do what history asks of us all: understand the past well enough to make sense of the present.
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Erin Leone is a community schools specialist at Luther Burbank High School in the Sacramento City Unified School District and was named SCUSD’s 2025 Teacher of the Year. A former history and social studies teacher and district content specialist, Leone leads “Teaching the Now,” preparing educators to teach current events and helping connect learning to the world students experience.
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