Inventing the Future, Post 9/11
Students have a role to play in civic renewal.
Along with 5,000 other New Yorkers, I attended "Listening to New York," an extraordinary "town meeting" designed to elicit the public's views on rebuilding Lower Manhattan and designing a memorial to commemorate the victims of the terrorist attack on New York City. It was a bracing object lesson in the possibilities of participatory democracy. As a citizen, I admired the willingness of our civic and political leaders to open up the process and to value the opinions of all New Yorkers. As an educator, however, I was struck again by the absence of students in the remarkable citywide conversation that has been taking place since last fall. Now that the city and the nation have commemorated the first anniversary of those tragic events, my colleagues and I feel more strongly than ever that it is critical to include students in this conversation. We must and will rebuild our city, but ultimately the revitalization of our civic culture will be the most powerful response to terrorism. Our young people must be a part of it.
In the days following the attack on our city, New Yorkers shared, as the urbanist Michael Sorkin eloquently put it, a "citizenship of common loss," but also—and increasingly as time passed—of common hope. Nowhere was that loss and that hope more intensely and collectively experienced than in New York City's classrooms. Our teachers thought only of the children who were their responsibility, and in turn, our students inspired the best in us. None of us will ever forget those first hours, first days, and first weeks. I remember driving home the last of my students, who had no other way to get uptown, late on the afternoon of Sept. 11. I finally returned to my own apartment after what seemed like an eternity. I hadn't seen my wife all day, although she is the lower school principal at our school. I told her what it was like at the high school that morning. She looked at me and said simply that she had stood with a class of 5- year-olds watching the towers fall. There was nothing more to say. We all have such haunting, indelible memories, which will...
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