Over the last few weeks, many have set out to answer the question: What lessons should we teach our children about the attacks of September 11th? Some have responded that we should emphasize tolerance, others have said patriotism, some have recommended that we teach about America's commitment to freedom, others have advised us to recognize America's history of cultural imperialism.
In a recent column on Slate.com, Jonathan Zimmerman argued that the question, "What lessons should we teach?" is the wrong question because it implies that we should transmit a single viewpoint or perspective about the attacks. Those who are attempting to answer the question, Zimmerman writes, break into two predictable camps: "the flag-wavers and the self-haters." Zimmerman charges that both camps share a deeply undemocratic assumption: that kids should agree with what they are taught and with those who teach them. Instead, he suggests, students should be presented with the views of both the "flag-wavers and the self-haters" and be allowed to make up their own minds, to come to their own conclusions about September 11th.
Someone needs to say a word for teaching America's core values and for waving the flag when appropriate. Here is my explanation.
Children are not born with an innate belief in the values of a free society. They are not born believing in the importance of freedom of speech, religion, expression, and the other freedoms and rights that we hold dear. They are not born believing in the right to form and organize groups independent of the government.
If they were, the world would be a freer, more democratic place than it is. But our daughters and sons do not enter the world knowing these things. They are profoundly vulnerable to what adults teach them, for good or for ill. If anything, we have ample evidence that churches, schools, the law, and the other institutions of society can be used to teach intolerance and hatred for those whose speech, religion, dress, and ideas differ from our own.
It makes no sense for parents, for society, or for schools to take a hands-off attitude towards children and assume that they will figure it all out for themselves. Some might conclude that it is OK to discriminate against people who are different; some deduce that it is OK to silence dissident voices; some might decide that it is OK to tie Matthew Shepard to a fencepost and leave him to die.
No, I think we must defend and teach the values that we believe in, not because they are ours, but because they are the values that make a free, democratic, multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious society possible. Without the civil liberties and political rights that undergird democratic society, we could see those rights and liberties whittled away by forces of passion, intolerance, religious hatred, and ignorance.
Where does the flag fit into this discussion? For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the flag is a symbol of our rights and freedoms. It is a symbol of the sacrifices that others have made over the years so that we might live in freedom, free to argue with each other, free to sneer at our elected officials, free to practice our religion or no religion at all.
Now comes the confession. One of my earliest family photographs shows me and a couple of my siblings in Houston, Texas, holding and waving small American flags. It was taken when I was 6 in 1944.
Why were we waving the flag? My uncle Herman was in the South Pacific, a sergeant in the U.S. Army, fighting the Japanese. He saw combat in some very bloody battles; many of his friends were killed, some while detained in Japanese POW camps. We were waving it for him and other American soldiers and sailors.
Why were we waving the flag? My family is Jewish. My mother arrived in America in 1917, my father's family earlier. In 1944, my mother's remaining family in Bessarabia was being processed into incinerators, as was my father's remaining family in Poland. None survived the war. We were waving the flag for them. We were waving the flag, too, for the American G.I.'s who were fighting and dying in Europe to stop the madman who had unleashed the war. We knew that they were fighting and dying for us.
Since 1960, I have lived in New York City where, over the years, I have not seen too many flags except for the annual veterans' parades, which were sparsely attended.
All that changed last September 11.
On that infamous date, I rushed to the harbor and arrived in time to see the second plane strike the second tower. It was right in front of me. I stood there watching people burn to death, watching massive flames and smoke pouring out of the two buildings, watching the sky above me fill up with confetti, the detritus from people's desks. People whose only "crime" was to come to work in the morning.
My neighborhood in Brooklyn that day was covered by a thick layer of ash that blew across the harbor. By noon, the ash blanketed the cars on the street, the dust so thick in the air that it was like night-time-on a day that began with a brilliant blue sky. A neighbor who lived across the street from me died at the top of one of the towers; she was a vice-president of Morgan Stanley. Everyone knew someone who died, and everyone knew people who had barely survived.
Overnight the flags began to appear in my neighborhood. This is a neighborhood that typically votes 90% Democratic. People who never owned a flag suddenly had one hanging over their front door, attached to their car antenna, pinned to their chest.
Most of the flags remained in place all year. They all came back again as the one-year anniversary of the attacks approached.
Why are people wearing and displaying and "waving" the flag? They are saying, in the shortest short-hand that they know, that we treasure our nation's ideals. We are part of a national community that has struggled to achieve its rights and freedoms, and we are determined to support and defend that national community and those rights and freedoms.
Part of the ongoing struggle involves teaching our children what those rights and freedoms are, how precious they are, how easily they have been lost in the past, and how important it is to understand and defend them.
I will continue to wave the flag, because I continue to love the ideals that our country represents. If others disagree, so be it. It's a free country.
Diane Ravitch is a Research Professor at New York University and a trustee of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.
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On Monday, President Bush announced two new government initiatives to invigorate the teaching of American history and culture. For details see "Two for the History Books," by Jacqueline Trescott, The Washington Post, September 18, 2002
