Public School Made My Kid Imagine Herself Dying in the Twin Towers on 9/11

Em2013
I honestly don't see a problem with this. If you can't imagine yourself dying then you don't have a realistic expectation in life. School should be less about daisies and worrying about offending someone and more about teaching people important lessons. I don't think it's the teacher's fault that the student ends up being raised as a total wuss. Imagining oneself dying in the twin towers is great because it teaches the kid how modifying it could be to die and to really take these things more seriously. These lessons are important to learn. Deal with it.

Not all children fit neatly into "one box" ....and whilst I agree that death is a life lesson that none of us can be shielded from I don't see how it is up to schools with their "pop psychology" that they love to practise. They have no idea of the individual needs of children and are not there to follow up and support them outside of school when confusing issues and questions may arise.

My daughter was set an assignment when she first started high school at 11. It was an exercise on learning about biographies. She was told to write a mini biography about her own life so far. Although they were aware she had lived through a traumatic time for around 3 of those short years they decided she shouldn't be exempt from the assignment as writing about that emotional period for the teacher may even be good for her.

I told them to stuff it where the sun doesn't shine! If a teacher decides my child needs help and guidance in an academic subject it is their prerogative to teach her accordingly....when it comes to her emotional needs and wellbeing I am the authority!

reply to post by Pinkorchid


It would have been nice to write something like that for my grandmother before she died unexpectedly. I don't think it's that big of a deal... everyone is going to die. Maybe we SHOULD think about it for the sake of not missing the opportunity to tell our loved ones what we want to before it's too late.

I swear, you people flip out about the silliest thing. I guess we shouldn't teach our kids about the minorities murdered by Nazi Germany. It might hurt their witless-- er, I mean wittle minds.

You people never wrote a bucket list in school?

Stop shielding your kids from LIFE.

My kid had to THINK about DYING! DYING!!! Lord whyyyy?

I think a couple of issues are being confused.....

The issue of whether children should be shielded from death and the fact that many horrors both historically and present take place ( which I don't think many responsible parents do)

And the issue of whether schools are best placed to decide when is the right time for individual children to ponder their own mortality in a setting and format that schools may dictate.

And also whether there is an hidden agenda to increasingly control the masses emotionally through fear.

I don't see the harm in this assignment. I was given a similar task when I was 12 (UK) to write from the trenches.

If you compare a task like this to what they see in movies and hear in songs nowadays it really is pretty tame.

Think of how many indigenous Americans died during the holocaust. Has anyone thought to get rid of the myriad of of western films that could be hurting thier psyches?

Think of how many children have actually died at the hands of US Authorities.

Sheltering your kids from issues like 9/11? What do you hope to gain?

reply to post by InkontinentiaBouquet

I don't see the harm in this assignment. I was given a similar task when I was 12 (UK) to write from the trenches.

Sort of a young boy's own heroic adventure seen through the eye's of a 12 year old boy , I would imagine.

As you state it's similar but not the same , if you were in one of the top floors of those building , you were going to die. Now they would have seen those poor people jumping form the windows , which was telecast to the world.
This was no glorified war story , even though many poor young men died then as well , nor a Cowboy's and Indians , saved by the Calvary saga. This was young children asked to picture their own deaths is the same circumstances as those that lost their lives in 911.

I'm not splitting hairs here , but their is a subtle nuance that is being overlooked.

It's not thinking about when Grandma dies or the family pet. Its not a third party association , its you looking at the possibility of your own death enmeshed in the media and known public distress of that horrific event and your a young child contemplating the end of your life.

I can not see where the empathy question can find validation within that particular scenario.
Neither am I saying that shielding and isolating children from what happens in the world is healthy for the child as well. But surely some concept of the impact upon these young children and perhaps an approach couched in a counselling format , would have been a better way to teach them about death.
And a process where the Parents themselves were at least informed of this essay.
Sure its important to teach empathy for others , but surely there is a much better way than this.

reply to post by Pinkorchid


I was taught about trenchfoot, water up to your waist, rats crawling over you ect ect ect until the moment of 'Going over the top'. There were real young teenage boys in those trenches. That's not a gloryfied imagining now is it? Watching thier mates limbs hit another mate in the face. Day after day after fing day. Please don't minimise it by calling it a glory story.

Lice, scurvey, cold....

Really happening, to young boys.

Month after month.

Year after year.

Until most of them killed each other and died.

Give me a one off freak event any day of the week over what happened in Europe.

But then is wasn't American kids. So it doesn't matter as much eh?

BTW, I don't think your councelling/therapy approach does much good. Judging by the amount of pharmaceuticals. What's going to happen when there is no money left to pay for all this mollycoddling? A far worse trauma than that of imagination, I tell you.

InkontinentiaBouquet



But then is wasn't American kids. So it doesn't matter as much eh?

I think that was a little uncalled for to be honest.

I did exactly the same at school, wrote a letter from the perspective of a young boy in the trenches in WWII.
Must be a UK thing obviously lol

I think the difference being....when we did that at school WWII was distant history as far as we were concerned. Yes it was horrible but it wasn't something that we associated with our everyday lives, so we could distance ourself from it. Children now grow up in a world where the threat of terrorism is constant and current.
Personally i do see a difference.

reply to post by Logos23


I am very sorry for that remark, it was very rude and not really what I meant.

I don't really know how to verbalise what I'm thinking but it seems anything bad that happens is always worse if it happens to an American since 911. It seems that what happens in another country is a 'pity' but when it happens to US it is an atrocity.

It was a few hours suffering for thoses that died. How can that be worse than a gas chamber? Or A bomb?

Those 13 year olds are probably too young to really remember so I would say history is history. Any of those autrocities could happen again, you can't say ww3 is not closer to peoples minds these days than 911. Saying that I don't live in the country that it happened.

Again, I'm sorry for my offensive behaviour.

reply to post by InkontinentiaBouquet


I'm going to go after you for the indigenous Americans remark. First of all, you're talking about the American schooling system. My youngest is half nat-am and grew up on a reservation. She knows her grandfather was shuttled off to an abusive boarding school and all the lovely other things that the US government did in response to Nat Ams. She's in the 6th grade. So far, it's been an annual parading around of the "pilgrims and Indians" story (she always chirps out that they are Native Americans to her teachers but do they listen? Nope, they are Indians.) One year, the class had to learn about a variety of tribes but they teach subjects like the Long Walk or the Trail of Tears? Nope. Just their cultures and dated ideas about the tribes plus a little lie about how Nat Ams get a check every month from the government (a total lie). By the time my eldest was in high school, it was he that was teaching his peers as to what the tribe we lived with was like and what happened to them as their first introduction to actual Native American History. They moved him into college early the next school year.

So, if the schools here don't even teach the subtle nuances of what happened to the tribes here in the US and you'd be amazed at how many times I've had people mention those darn monthly checks, btw, then isn't that called "revisionism"? And if you have a contrast of a personalized emphasis on 9/11, which was much more recent and a highly televised event that took a few thousand unjustly off the face of this earth, then how is the decision to engage in such a task not political? It has a political purpose that is beneficial to planting that seed of fear within kids at a young age while their creativity hasn't yet tapered off.

reply to post by Pinkorchid


I don't know the intention behind the death education from 20 years ago. The educational system in the US changed dramatically in the late 1950's. Somebody somewhere along the line thought that using the field of psychology within the educational system was an excellent idea and it went so far as to be mandated by Congress itself through the 1958 NDEA. That's pretty much when school counselors came into being. You had some programs that were being handled strictly by psychologists or individuals that were trained in using psychology in teaching and so on. The concept of educational psychology was essentially born in this manner. Now and then I see people comment about how textbooks from the turn of the century are much more difficult than textbooks today and I'd say that it's because of this change. The earlier type of school taught, the later, facilitated learning. The educational system thoroughly planted itself in the role of child psychologist. There are two significant problems with that: 1. an emphasis on psychology, while easily being construed as manipulative, is not teaching and 2. the teachers are not psychologists. Like in the 20/20 video, they are basically emulating training that they received in day seminars.

The heavier form of death education ended up blowing up in their faces. Suicide rates in the 90's for young teens increased. The spike in school shootings for the 80's and 90's was huge. In the 1970's, there were 13 school shooting related deaths. In the 1980's, there were 71. In the 1990's, there were 276 homicides/deaths in school related shootings. It was so bad in the 90's that the Secret Service volunteered to help with the issue by attempting to form a profile of a school shooter. Was death education related? Considering that it was introduced in the 80's and dealt with the subject of death to make it something less feared, I think that it played a significant role.

Overall intention behind it--my guess is that somebody suggested that it would be a great avenue to help reach out to kids. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. I listened to a trialogue a while back between Terrence McKenna, Rupert Sheldrake, and Ralph Abraham on the subject of education in a NWO while at Esalen. One of the things mentioned was death education. There are a surprising number of school psychologists and educational psychologists that went to Esalen. You might be interested in giving it a listen.

reply to post by UnifiedSerenity

No apologies, good rant.

I am not saying this particular teacher is some mind psy-op person,

I do. I think they purposefully became a teacher to mold kids minds in their image. These kind are dangerous.

reply to post by InkontinentiaBouquet


I must admit I felt a tad bad for "pulling you up" on that comment...I can see from your overall post's on this thread that you are genuinely just expressing your own view point. And in a way I can "kinda" see the point you was trying to make. I believe that you do not wish to offend anyone...so I am sorry if I called you out so quickly

I still don't agree with your viewpoint....but I certainly respect it lol

reply to post by Logos23


Alls well, nothing to feel bad about at all. I'm going to read over this thread again when I am fresh tomorrow. I love getting into topics that make me emotional, I just have to riegn it in a bit. Thank you for the dialouge.

reply to post by Pinkorchid

Sounds like the beginnings of monarch style trauma programming. The more trauma, apparently the greater the increase in personality displacement and the creation of alters. But what else would you expect from the indoctrination system employees who work for a bunch of sick @ssclowns in government or worse.

Cheers - Dave

Ok I'm interested to know where do people draw the line on the education system using traumatic events to teach children?

Do we for example ,extrapolate this out to taking 10 year olds on a field trip to the cemetery to study biology and view a exhumed 8 month old corpse?

Do we take kindergarten children, for their sex education to brothels?

These examples may seem extreme but the insidious movement into this type of teaching is a slow process , that at first doesn't seem so bad. But gradually the curriculum is sprinkled with more and more of this type of psychosocial attacks on the child's psychological bearing.

Remember too the parents were not consulted.

reply to post by Pinkorchid


I think that sheltering children from traumatic and historic events is not good. If anything, I think the current educational system does little to prepare children for reality in some very distinct ways. They teach what works with the political narrative and omit what is the actuality. For instance, all students learn about the US Constitution in history but do they learn about examples of what occurred when say, protests occur. However, I think a serious degree of caution should be used in the methodology of teaching these kind of events. A few years ago, my eldest got the opportunity in school to hear a survivor of Auschwitz speak. He found it incredibly moving and he cried in it. But he has valued that particular assembly ever since and holds a great admiration for the man because he survived. When I was in middle school, we had to watch a documentary on Hiroshima which featured images of the shadows of people left on the walls and the radiation affected, complete with skin sloughing on and burn marks. Was it traumatic? Yes but safely through the confines of celluloid. It being film didn't diminish the impression that it left in me (nukes are horrible things) and I will always remember what we did. All in all, those are good and controlled kinds of exposures to traumatic events.

Instead of the assignment for this class, why not a school wide assembly where a willing survivor of the 9/11 attacks speaks to them about what it was like, what troubles they experienced while all along showing that they survived? I met a 9/11 survivor a few years ago by the name of Gabrielle who does public speaking on these matters. She was amazing to talk to. Why not that instead?

There are good forms of practicum and there are bad. Teaching children about a traumatic event is a requirement for education in regards to our history because history is filled with them. However, the caution that should be used is not in simply getting the child to feel as if they were in that position and about to die or to cater necessarily to despair. It should be, instead, to emphasize that human quality of being able to survive even the most wretched or terrifying of circumstances. Imagine what that could do with teen suicide rates.

For all else, let life be the teacher. There's no need to fast track and homogenize attempts at wisdom through a pseudo-psychological mechanism. Teach them about safe sex, sure, but no pornos or in class examples. Let them learn about death on their own and, if they should encounter it, have actual trained psychologists around to help them cope but only at the permission of the parents or in an extreme case. Overall, schools shouldn't be the psychological gatekeepers of our children's emotional states in a very direct manner.

Dave--check out "positive disintegration" sometime. You might have to dig but I think it's what you may be looking for.

reply to post by WhiteAlice


Thanks Alice , well put.

brandiwine14
I'm actually going to go against the grain here and say I see nothing wrong with this.....except perhaps the teacher should have simply just said a plane crash and not used 911.

Look I had to write a paper like this in school, it was tenth grade I believe and not junior high but it didn't bother me.
Kids always and especially nowadays think they are immortal and that nothing can ever happen to them. This is false, we all know this.

I think that in writing a paper like this it forces the kids to understand that life is short and you can die at any minute.....car crash, plane crash, falling down stairs, cancer etc.... This forces them to think about life and death and to understand they will die and maybe for a moment they will appreciate what they have while they have it. As well as cherish their relationships with their families and friends a little more.

People are way to offended nowadays and pc it's crazy.

This is pretty close to my thoughts in a nutshell. It's not the assignment that is bothersome as much as the specific correlation to 9-11, but whatever. What scares me more is that the standard MSM 9-11 story is what is still taught, even to me right now in college, and questioning it is not allowed in class. That's a discussion for another forum though.

My point is, this is not too dark for 12-13 year olds. Heck, many of my friends had died by high school. My very best friend since the second grade, along with his little sister who was basically my little sister too, died on our freshman year in a plane crash that was a mid-air collision.

One girl who was also like a younger sister to me, a sixth grader, rode the bus home one day to find her mother had blown her own head off in the kitchen.

This assignment is not too dark for 12-13 year olds as many, if not most, have already been to much darker places. If these kids have been sheltered enough that this assignment is a problem for them well...I don't know if they're blessed or dangerously unaware of what's around them.

intrptr
Awww, our sentiments are hurt. Really? You know what the kids are told in some foreign classrooms?

"Listen children, you hear that? Thats the sound of American bombs falling." They don't need to be told, they can hear it.

There's always one asshole. You know what they should be told?

Listen children,that's the sound of our government not taking care of us.

And teaching you that blowing yourself up is the way to go! OH and anything from the west is bad!

calstorm
My husband is a teacher, and when I told him about this, his response was "that was a stupid thing to do, did the teacher get sued?"

Certainly his replay had to do with people these days and not the exercise itself.