WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — When talking about teaching the greatest American tragedy of the 21st century in today's classrooms, teachers draw a parallel to how they were taught about one of the defining moments of the 21st century.

 

"Oddly now, it is kind of like when my World War II relatives and teachers talked about the Depression or Pearl Harbor," Mount Greylock Regional School history teacher Jeffrey Welch said recently. "The kids [today] are generally interested in personal and social history, and so, for that reason alone, they are curious.

 

"But 9/11 is also a 21st century icon. Local families lost loved ones, some of whom are still connected to the school community. Also, so many have connections to NYC and have been to Ground Zero and the museum. It is poignant, I think, but far less visceral for the students to study with the passage of time."

 

As the nation prepares to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks on Friday, the nation's classrooms are the place where the events of 9/11 and its repercussions are being taught to a generation that lacks the emotional grounding in the events at Ground Zero that high school students may have had as recently as a dozen years ago.

 

At Wahconah Regional High School, Bryan Patton, who was reached separately for this story, made the same historical reference when asked about teaching 9/11 25 years after the fact.

 

"It's interesting because the way we have covered 9/11 has evolved over the years," Patton said. "It definitely used to get students' attention as a current or recent event years ago. For many students now, it's the way Pearl Harbor or Vietnam was when I was a student in the '90s.

 

"It was actually a difficult thing for my colleagues and I to grasp as they didn't live through it. It was before they were born so to them it's just an historical event. They ask questions. They care. But it's not the visceral response it used to be."

 

Teaching 9/11 has been a topic in education circles for years.

 

In 2016, around the 15th anniversary of September 11, New York City public school teacher Sari Rosenberg told U.S. News and World Report magazine that the September 11 attacks already were being taught more like history than current events to high school juniors who were just barely alive when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, crashed a plane into the Pentagon in Virginia and brought down United Flight 93 in western Pennsylvania.

 

"It's become less of a sensitive topic — though it's still very sensitive — and more of a really useful way to get kids to start thinking like historians," Rosenberg told the magazine.

 

Just last year, Gov. Maura Healey issued a statement calling for all students in the commonwealth to be taught about 9/11 and its aftermath.

 

"I've directed the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education and the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to work together to ensure that it is fully incorporated into school curriculum frameworks," Healey said in a Sept. 11, 2025, news release. "I'm grateful to the families of 9/11 victims who have advocated for this and are making sure that we never forget this horrific tragedy, the incredible displays of heroism on that day, or the thousands of lives that were lost."

 

The attacks already were part of DESE's History and Social Science Framework, last updated in 2018.

 

Among seven major topics in the curriculum for high school World History II is, "The politics of difference: conflicts, genocide, and terrorism." The curriculum area calls for students to, among other things, learn about the emergence of the global network al-Qaida, the Islamist extremist group responsible for the September 11 attacks. And, in a U.S. History II curriculum area titled "Defending democracy: the Cold War and civil rights at home," Massachusetts high school students are asked to, "Evaluate the effectiveness of the federal government's response to," the 2001 terrorist attacks.

 

When the subject comes up in the classroom depends on the school and the teacher.

 

"I am generally invited by [Principal Jacob Schutz] to make an announcement followed by a moment of silence during the morning announcements on 9/11," Mount Greylock's Welch said. "I add some historical context for precisely the reasons you mention; there is now a whole generation between the attacks and now, and most of the students — and, believe it or not, probably a few staff — weren't alive when it happened.

 

"Sometimes the kids want to know more about the day and we spend some time talking about it in class, too, but we also include it in the curriculum. It comes up in the spring semester in U.S., European, and world history classes."

 

It also is a combination of approaches at Wahconah, Patton said.

 

"For the past few years, we have had one teacher who does a special lesson on it on the actual day or a week of 9/11," he said. "The rest of us have worked it into our regular curriculum. In my AP history course, we spend a lot of time talking about the political impact it had on our foreign policy and domestic politics. In our world history courses, we spend a lot of time discussing the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in the late 20th century. We are very careful to differentiate that from mainstream Islam."

 

Another parallel between Sept. 11, 2001, and Dec. 7, 1941: Both raise complicated issues that require nuanced classroom conversations.

 

For the latter, a program of Japanese internment camps that remains a hotly debated part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's legacy eight decades later and the world's only use of an atomic weapon to end the war in the Pacific four years after Japan brought the United States into World War II. For the former, a surrender of personal liberty under actions like the Patriot Act and a two-decade military presence in Afghanistan.

 

"In the wake of the Arab Spring in 2011, we used to do a project that had students research and propose the best way the U.S. should respond to such events in order to promote democracy and ensure security," Patton said. They were asked to apply their knowledge of 20th century U.S. foreign policy, and the lessons of 9/11 in their response.

 

"We also discuss the impact of American foreign policy and how it relates to events like 9/11. Despite the growing distance between today and 2001, it still does bring out many stories for students about their parents or grandparents living through that day."

 

Welch also talked about the larger context in which September 11 is discussed.

 

"Our goal is to help students understand the world that they are living in as best they/we can, and this is a significant event that brought about the biggest foreign policy shift since the Cold War, and isn't unrelated to current events in the Middle East," he said. "It is now couched in a longer context in Middle Eastern regional history, and the point in part now is not just what it did to the U.S., but also the region and the world since to explain the world that the students live in now."