Three days from now, on September 11, 2026, the 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil will arrive. Exactly two states — Florida and Arizona — will require their students to learn a standard curriculum about what happened that day. Two. Out of fifty.
Ten other states have laws that "encourage" 9/11 lessons. The rest don't mention it at all. And four states — Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Oregon — actively recommend a curriculum that spends more time on "Islamophobia" than on the 2,996 Americans who were murdered.
The curriculum in question comes from a program called "Teaching Beyond September 11th," developed through the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. It's the one that those four states point teachers toward.
Here's what the curriculum covers. It notes that "on the 11th of September 2001, 19 hijackers flew two airplanes into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, one airplane into the Pentagon in Virginia, and a fourth into a field in Pennsylvania." The lesson modules include "Islamophobia and the Oval Office," "Right-wing Extremism," "Islamophobia in Global Context," "Surveillance of Muslims," and "The Muslim and African Ban." Then it pivots to explaining that "the U.S. accused Saudi national Osama bin Laden, living in Afghanistan at the time, of being the mastermind behind the attacks."
Accused.
As if there's an ongoing debate about whether the founder and leader of al-Qaeda, who publicly celebrated the attacks and was later killed in a U.S. military raid for orchestrating them, was actually responsible.
New York State Assemblyman Matt Slater, a Republican from Yorktown, didn't mince words about it. "Nearly 3,000 innocent people were murdered by al Qaeda on September 11th. They were the victims. The terrorists were the perpetrators," Slater said. "Any curriculum that blurs that fundamental truth, or makes the victims secondary to a political narrative, isn't teaching history, it's rewriting it."
He's right, but the rewriting is the point. The shift didn't happen by accident. Somebody sat in a room at the University of Pennsylvania and decided that the most important thing a teenager should learn about September 11 is that Muslims experienced prejudice afterward. Not that 19 men turned commercial airliners into guided missiles. Not that office workers jumped from 100 stories rather than burn alive. Not that 343 firefighters died running toward the danger. The lesson plan skips all of that to get to the part where America is the villain.
And it's working. A generation of kids is growing up in states where the educational establishment decided the aftermath of 9/11 matters more than the event itself. Where lessons about the Danish Muhammad cartoon riots — which killed more than 250 people — get filed under the heading of Western provocation rather than religious extremism.
We made a promise 25 years ago. "Never forget." Forty-eight states couldn't even be bothered to mandate that their kids learn what they're supposed to be remembering.
