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

This can't be what is being taught in American schools , can it?

What could the possible benefit of getting young children to write letters and imagine they are about to die?

This seems to me to be some sort of sick psychological game playing by the education authorities.
RE-enforcing the trauma of that terrible event upon the very young can only have one outcome and that is increased fear and possible psychological damage to the child.
Or is that what the Government really wants , every child compliant because they are traumatized?
It needs to be stopped now!!!!

Case in point: Activist Post reported that 12 and 13-year-olds were forced to write what basically amounted to suicide notes as part of a class assignment on the anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks:

www.activistpost.com...

Wow. I find this to be quite disturbing.

Why would any teacher ask children of this age to write something like this, let alone ANY child or person for that matter.

What the hell is wrong with people?! They say the images of the planes crashing, much less the aftermath is too disturbing to show 'too much' (if at all, in some cases) for a nation of adults. Perhaps they have a point...and perhaps we NEED that reminder.

Yet, they'll terrorize the crap out of kids by having them imagine the worst a child's mind can conjure to fill blanks with on that horrible morning??? I've mentally explored what media cannot know to report of what must have been happening to cause people to jump ..willingly...and in large numbers. It's a HORRIBLE place to mentally go..and NOT a place for the young. Under ANY circumstances.

Someone ought to be professionally reprimanded at the VERY least for this kind of insane stunt. These are not' little adults. They are kids...with the emotional capacity of children. Too many adults, I believe, give no thought to the fact we aren't equal by any stretch of the imagination for taking in pure evil and horror to proper contexts.

what the hell is wrong with teachers these days.
This is installing fear just while the brain is developing, I remember a similar reported incident but I forget what it was about.

reply to post by Pinkorchid


I wonder if this was the teachers desire or if it was the teachers guide that requested the students to write such a horrible assignment!?!? For the life of me I cannot imagine any teacher coming up with that idea. It seems to me that it must be in the guide so that the young will accept the OS... Sort of reinforce brainwashing...

That is a scary thought. The more that they system does this the more in history OS will appear to be true. I don't know which is worse....

Star n Flag and thanks for letting us know!

The assignment was as follows :

If you knew you were about to die, who would you want to be the last person that you talked to? Write a letter to that person. What would you want them to know? Please give a lot of thought to this letter.

I don't think that's beyond the reach of 12 or 13 year old children ? I don't think it's particularly insensitive, either. You'd have to be an incurable optimist to expect children not to have thought about death & dying. Most children by that age have been taught about the birds & the bees, about death. They've maybe seen a grandparent die, attended family funerals etc.

I think some you underestimate what children can and can't take in. You're in danger of wrapping them up in cotton wool. Well, sorry folks, but I think kids of that age can take an assignment like that.

Anyway, the parent's an anti-government activist, hardly an impartial observer, she's just using this assignmnet as a tool by which to whip a probably very good teacher and a probably very good school. Shame on her.

The linked article has more alarming examples.

If I didn't know any better, some people might think is part of the political indoctrination methods that seem to be widely used for decades.

Maybe it's a result of higher education indoctrination methods.

Maybe it's just a few simple mistakes by unqualified or psychologically challenged 'teachers'.

Fourth grade students in Illinois were recently given a “What Is Government?” worksheet with a cartoon Uncle Sam character holding a baby wearing a matching stars and bars top hat that literally told the children “Government is like a nation’s family. Families take care of children and make sure they are safe, healthy and educated, and free to enjoy life.” Uh-huh. Apparently Uncle Sam actually believes he’s your uncle now.


A private school in New York City made students as young as 14 write suicide notes that included justification for why they would kill themselves.


Arizona fourth graders were given a worksheet asking students what would happen if a woman found another woman’s hairclip under her bed. One girl wrote, “The husband had cheated, and he was in big trouble.” The school apologized, claiming the teacher hadn’t fully read the assignment before handing it out.


Kindergarteners in Illinois are being taught sex education, including the examination of different family structures, such as whether or not there’s two moms at home. The curriculum follows the recommendations of The Future of Sex Education (FoSE) sponsored in part by the Society of State Leaders of Health and Physical Education that includes an advisory committee of senior officials from Planned Parenthood and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN).

more examples of the incompetence

?

We often focus on the ideological biases of the university, where the more lunatic examples of political correctness get the most attention. But in education as in economics, there is a trickle-down effect. The grandees at the elite universities train the PhD’s who go on to second and third tier institutions, where they in turn train the students who get high school and grade school teaching credentials. They also write most of the textbooks that end up in K-12 classrooms. Thus the progressive ideology metastasizes throughout the educational system, determining the curriculum, the textbooks, and the point of view of the teachers. At that level the ideas may be garbled, half-baked, incoherent, and a collection of clichés and slogans. But they are still toxic and effective at transmitting a world-view to impressionable minds.

Is Leftist School Indoctrination Unstoppable?

Makes ya wonder.

I can see this as a junior or senior in high school. But I can't see it for someone in middle school.
that's just asking for nightmares and other problems to come up. IMHO

I don't think its that shocking.

There are many children that age that have to deal with the death of loved ones so perhaps introducing them to this subject in a thought provoking way may lessen some of the impact if say one of their parents or a close family member dies.

I think its a good thing but should be done with kid gloves.

I want my daughter to know from the get-go as many outcomes as I can regarding any situation. She in college, and our discussions are now centered around date rape and someone slipping her a roofie in her drink, the consequences of doing molly, and other drugs, and drinking alcohol. Am I mean? HECK NO. I want her to know that the real world has some really bad people in it and how to think of all outcomes of any scenario before she chooses to participate. I feel knowing the truth the whole ugly truth is the only way to get our children to be responsible adults. that is what is wrong with kids today, we try to shelter them from everything. Therefore we turn them into self centered brats who cannot think for themselves or know how to make informed choices on their own because no one tells them the scary dark ugly truth.

Now, regarding writing a letter as if you were dying. I dont see anything wrong with that. It made the kids think. It made them think of what they appreciate in this world and maybe gave them a little empathy to the souls lost that day. It may have also, just for a moment, made them realize the world does not soley revolve around them.



We cannot protect our children from everything bad. We can arm them with information and help them through honest discussions on how to make informed good choices.

The most important thing children need to know is that they are safe. That is why they test boundaries. "Do mom and dad really mean it and will the stop me from hurting myself" is in their little minds on a subconscious level. To have a child imagine they are about to die at such an age does not help them to grow up wise, but it makes them feel unsafe, and the baggage left over for many could bring up a lot of unnecessary problems at home and school.

Let's face it, kids see a lot of scary movies that are not very productive for them. I have looked at parents taking their seven year old child to see a pg13 movie. I am a bit horrified to think what this is doing to their sense of safety by seeing such things at that age. Even 13 year old should not be seeing some of this stuff, but they are, and they are getting more violent, have less respect for life, and in general more anti-social in their behavior.

I think it is best to leave such things for later years as flyersfan said. Actions do have consequences, but I really don't want my seven year old looking over their shoulder constantly waiting to die!

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.

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.

reply to post by intrptr


So, are those children well balanced? War is terrible. Are you saying we should expose children to war so they can all be paranoid? I bet parents in war zones would give anything for their children to love in a safe environment. Are we supposed to instill fear in young impressionable children so they can be like those children or should we be ending war and stopping the bombing of civilians?

Why don't we have them imagine they are being sexually abused and tortured, read stories about such things, and have them write how they feel. That should bring about a well balanced child.

reply to post by UnifiedSerenity


No. But you should discuss it with your children. They should know it exists. They should know how to recognize it. They should know how to defend themselves against it.

My child trusts herself, her family and the world around her BECAUSE she knows the good and the bad. A child cannot trust the world around her if she is never exposed to anything but good. The world is not always good. She is BY FAR not looking over her shoulder. Instead she is a very confident happy kid. She also knows that not every person or situation is a good one and how to recognize those situations and people and how to remove herself from it. Which gives her confidence to be in this world, away at college and trust her environment because she KNOWS what is in that environment. If you tell a kid nothing but sunshine and roses, the first time they encounter something that is not sunshine and roses it makes them distrust their world and their environment. Honesty makes confident kids. The only kids looking over their shoulders are the kids who have been sheltered from the world.

Sounds like death education in a lot of ways. Basically, what I would define as "death education" would be the forcing of a student to deeply envision themselves as a deceased individual. The idea behind it is to make "history real" and has a little bit of existentialism tied in it as well. When I went to school, we had to go on a field trip to a cemetery, find a gravestone of someone close in age to ourselves, then contemplate their being dead and doing a tombstone rubbing of the gravestone. I also recall being taken somewhere to see a dead body and a girl near me vomiting. How that differs from this is that when you're looking at a tombstone, you don't know the cause of death--Was it an accident? Illness? Murder? In the case of envisioning oneself as a deceased person in a highly known event, it is simply too graphic as there is a ton of information out there already that can give the child indicators as to what it must've been like. The effect would be traumatizing.

I'm not a fan of either the cemetery field trips, no matter how much they are espoused to be great for comprehending one's place in history and the temporary nature of one's life, or this particular exercise. The former has been thrown into question as possibly being related to student's suicides and, in the most extreme case, may have had something to do with one of the school shooters in the 90's. You see, little Andrew Wurst thought he had died several years prior and that period of his believed death would've coincided with the grade he would've gone on that cemetery field trip. Of course, he was also schizophrenic but the end result still may have been the death of a teacher. So no, not a fan of death education in the slightest.

reply to post by k21968


Yes, and it is the parent who knows best how to share that sort of information. Many children begin to deal with death by the loss of their beloved pets, and some who have lost siblings, parents, grandparents etc.. It is not for the school to do this and that is where my problem lies with this.

reply to post by UnifiedSerenity


I get that, but, the majority of parents do not do this and their children are not prepared for the real world or college or anything else.

A case in point, my daughter's middle school (she was in 8th grade when her father deployed) dedicated every Friday to watching CNN in class for one period (yeah I know) so the kids could learn about the war in Afghanistan. Parents were in an uproar saying they did not want their children exposed to it. Seriously, these were 12-14 year olds. I was appalled. The school held firm and it made my daughter and other military kids at her school (she was not the only one we lived near a military base) to feel included and have their needs addressed as well. In fact, her 8th grade history teacher went above and beyond talking to my daughter daily to make sure she was ok. To make sure she didn't need to talk, vent or cry. He was a godsend.

I think our schools have good intentions but they cannot make everyone happy. In our case, they made military kids happy and the other parents did not understand how important this was to this population of student.

I am now curious as to where this took place...if it was near a military base or near the site of one of the attacks I say it is 100% appropriate for the school to address it.

Maybe in Idaho, not so much.

~K2

The note in the article is from Autin TExas. Austin texas lies just outside the Brook Army Base and Lackland Air Force base. See this is totally appropriate. Many military children live in Austin. Maybe this parent is not affiliated with the military but I would bet my last daughter a strong percentage of children there are.

It is the same as celebrating Black History Month. I am not black. Black history does not effect me? OR DOES IT?? Of course it does.

reply to post by Pinkorchid


I think this is a lot of overreaction. It would help kids, and they were older? empathize.

When I was about the same age we had a teacher read the final moments of the Apollo 1 disaster. It was a very dramatic and descriptive account to include final communications. Every day for a week and some points after the class pressed her to read it again. She finally asked if we were all morbid. Considering the days, the times and the fascination with the space program and with so many dreaming of being an astronaut, we were simply relating to the anguish and putting ourselves in the situation. Psychologically its deeper than that even.

I can name about 10 things that would gas me about what they do at school, what they learn other than this role playing.