From memory to history: Teaching 9/11 in Saskatchewan schools 25 years later

Twenty-five years ago, Kelly Klassen took his high school students to the library to watch history unfold.

Klassen was teaching Grade 11 and 12 history and social sciences when the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks occurred. He said he remembers arriving at school that morning and learning what was happening.

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Students were taken to the library where televisions carried live coverage, but Klassen said teachers soon decided it was time to turn them off.

“I think maybe when the towers are coming down, that’s when we kind of — we needed to not let students just inhale this. We needed to help decompress, think about it and talk about it and figure out how to present it to them in a different way,” he said.

Twenty-five years later, Klassen, a social sciences and history teacher at Carlton Comprehensive Public High School in Prince Albert, is still talking about Sept. 11 with students.

The difference now is that none of his Grade 12 students were alive when the attacks happened.

“Back then, the ones that were there experienced it,” Klassen said.

Those students had conversations about terrorism, racism and world security as the events were unfolding. Today’s students, he said, are hearing about it secondhand and seeing clips through news and social media.

“I don’t know if they understand the consequences and how life has changed as a result of it, but I think the feelings are a lot different than they were then,” he said.

Carlton Grade 12 student Connor Reilly, 16, knows Sept. 11 only as a historical event. He said he knows it happened in New York City, that many people died and that it changed the world.

One of the biggest differences he associates with life before and after the attacks is something he has experienced himself: airport security.

“The part I know the most is that airports were a lot easier to get through,” Reilly said.

Reilly said he remembers first learning more extensively about Sept. 11 around Grade 8, when a teacher showed students recordings from the day, including phone calls from families and news coverage.

At St. Mary High School, Grade 12 student Tessa Gardiner has learned about Sept. 11 through a combination of school, conversations with her parents and social media. Gardiner has asked her parents a question familiar to those who lived through the attacks: Where were you?

Her mother told her she was in class and the television was turned on.

Gardiner has no similar memory of her own. She said she knows what happened and understands the scale of the tragedy, but there are parts of the history she still wants to understand.

As she’s grown older, Gardiner said she has wondered more about why the attacks happened and how people in the organization responsible convinced themselves to carry them out.

Some of what Gardiner has encountered about Sept. 11 has come through social media.

She said she has seen jokes comparing two apartment buildings in Prince Albert to New York’s Twin Towers, including references to planes hitting them.

She said she didn’t fully understand those jokes when she was younger, and learning more about the attacks changed the way she viewed them.

“It feels like a mockery almost of what people have endured in the past,” Gardiner said.

Klassen said social media can provide an opportunity for further discussion.

“I hope kids who see things on social media, that they ask questions and talk to adults who maybe were around at that time or have information that would be worthy of adding information to the meme,” he said.

He said students get information from many different sources and conversations can help add facts and knowledge.

The Saskatchewan Ministry of Education said there are opportunities in History 20 and History 30 to explore global conflicts and Canada’s role in them. Teachers in Saskatchewan can also incorporate current events as part of their teaching and course delivery.

The ministry reviews and recommends implementation resources to support new and renewed curricula, while schools and school divisions make decisions about learning resources based on division policies.

Klassen said Sept. 11 can fit into different subject areas, even though it isn’t specifically taught through the curriculum. In history, he regularly uses current events.

At St. Mary, history teacher Lance Bashutzky experienced Sept. 11, 2001 from a different place in the classroom. Born in 1995, Bashutzky was in Grade 1 when the attacks occurred and remembers teachers turning on televisions at school.

Now, he’s on the other side of the classroom, discussing the event with students who weren’t born when it happened.

Both he and Klassen said their students generally understand some of the changes that followed, including increased airport security. Their classes discuss racism and stereotyping, civil liberties and the balance between freedom and security, but Klassen said there is a difference between understanding those consequences and having experienced the day itself.

“I remember those,” Klassen said of the feelings surrounding the anniversary. “They don’t have those feelings, so I don’t know if it means the same thing, but I think they understand how society’s changed as a result of it.”

Reilly said he sees that divide in his own life.

He has a friend his age in Arizona, but said Sept. 11 isn’t something they talk about as a shared experience.

“I think it’s a historical event to the both of us,” he said.

Gardiner believes schools should continue teaching about Sept. 11 even though the attacks occurred outside Canada.

“It’s important because it affected the whole world,” she said.

Twenty-five years ago, Klassen was the teacher helping students process what they were watching as it happened. Bashutzky was a Grade 1 student watching the same events unfold from the other side of the classroom.

Today, both are at the front of their classrooms, introducing another generation to Sept. 11 and the changes that followed.

For their students, Sept. 11 isn’t a memory.

It’s history.