Watch now: Learning about 9/11 is different when the students view it as history – The Pantagraph

DECATUR — Students now in college were, for the most part, not yet born or very young on Sept. 11, 2001.

To many of them, the events of that day is not one that touches their lives, really. They’ve never known a world without the War on Terror, or the enhanced security of airports.

For Wyatt Henschen, however, 9/11 is the day his great-uncle died in his office at the Pentagon.

Henschen, 21, never knew Capt. Jack Punches, who was a retired Navy captain, but unlike many of his peers at Millikin University, Henschen feels a very personal connection to that day.

“My family has all talked about it,” he said. “I have a unique dive into that event.”

Punches was a native of Tower Hill and was a high-ranking official working on the war on drugs.

“It’s a time show appreciation about the sacrifices that those soldiers went through after 9/11,” Henschen said. “I’ve had family members in the military before then and since then, so I kind of understand why it’s a significant event and agree, to an extent, the intervention (in the Middle East) and the way it’s happened. There’s no way we shouldn’t have done something, and I feel like intervention was necessary.”

Most students his age, Henschen said, hardly acknowledge the day at all, and he understands that to them it’s not the same as it is to people who remember it, or have a connection to it.

“It’s another (anniversary) of the day my family lost somebody,” he said. “It’s another day and another year of remembering who he was and the 3,000 other people who lost their lives that day.”

Teaching students about that day and for them, learning about it, is different than discussing it with people who remember it.

“They do view it as kind of a remote thing,” said Dan Monroe, a professor of history at Millikin University. “In many respects, it’s similar to when I talk about the Civil War, or World War II or the Kennedy assassination. They have no conception of it, because they didn’t live through it. Just as I do for those things, I try to hit them with multiple approaches. If I talk about 9/11, I may show some video. The video is striking, the planes hitting the towers, the towers coming down. And it’s typically not shown anymore. You rarely see it, because it’s upsetting.”

A lot of today’s students are very visual learners, he said, because they’ve grown up with smartphones and video of news events, and the video is necessary not only to help them understand what happened that day, but to feel what people felt who were there.

“Once I grab them with the video, then I segue into what were the responses,” Monroe said. “The response to create Homeland Security, which is with us today, the invasion of Iraq, the invasion of Afghanistan, which just came to a close, and about all the ramifications of it.”

For a survey class, which covers a lot of ground, the topic might be handled more briefly, but in his Islamic World class, which is an upper-division course, he might devote the entire class to it, he said, within the context of a broader treatment of Islamic terrorism.

“It’s a continuing problem,” he said. “What I say in the Islamic World class is that 9/11 is a reflection of an ongoing crisis within Islam as a religion. What I mean by that is, it’s a push-pull against modernity. Within Islam, just as within the Christian Reformation, when there were movements to modernize and make it less like the Inquisition in Spain in the 15th century, the same thing is going on within Islam. There are debates going on about what should be permitted and what’s allowed, and that’s where you get this Islamic extremism.”

How the United States is involved in that debate, he said, is that the country is the ultimate exporter of modernity. On a visit to China in 1989, he said, that idea came home to him when he saw a farmer with an ox in a rice field, farming just like his ancestors had farmed for centuries, but next to the field were billboards advertising American products.

For fundamentalists, Monroe said, America stands for all the things they’re fighting against: women’s rights, gay rights, modernization of every kind. Understanding that helps Americans understand why Islamic fundamentalists hate the United States.

Madison Roberson, 22, a senior who, like Henschen, plans to teach secondary social science, hopes to help her future students look at the day with perspective, even if she herself has no memory of it.

“It’s really hard for me and a lot of people in my generation to feel the same way as I’m sure you guys (who remember it) do about it,” she said. “I think that obviously we view that day as a tragedy, 100 percent, we’re shown in elementary school the video of the Twin Towers going down over and over and over. I’ve visited the memorials and found it emotional. At the same time, I do feel a disconnect. I can see that a lot of adults get very upset about it, and I don’t feel the same.”

Her history professor stops at the Cold War, she said, so it hasn’t come up in that class, but in her sociology class, their focus is on Islamophobia.

“We talk about how it has hurt so many people with stereotyping and prejudice, instead of talking about how emotional that day was,” she said. “I do remember starting out with some testimonials from first responders and that was emotional, that this was a tragic event that affected thousands. But then we quickly moved on to see how that is still having an effect on us today, and on Muslim Americans, and how does it ruin their lives now.”

When she begins teaching, she said, she hopes to use those recordings to help her students feel those emotions, too.

“For something that’s so far removed (from me), that’s something that breaks through,” she said. “Hearing the firefighters, hearing the phone calls the people on the planes made, that makes it emotional.”