New York: In Pakistan, the government-approved textbooks give 9/11 only the briefest of mentions. While one text says the attacks were the work of "unidentified terrorists," most do not describe the attacks, but simply stress that after 9/11, Pakistan supported the United States' anti-terrorist campaign.
In Hong Kong, the Education Bureau suggests having students role-play being the hijackers, World Trade Center workers, Afghan children, New York City police officers, Islamic citizens in Muslim countries and others.
In India, textbooks describe the American response to the attacks as a kind of cowboy justice that did not much defer to diplomacy. And in Indonesia and Israel, 9/11 has no place in the formal curriculum.
"Because there are so many different themes, so many things you can talk about, countries created narratives that met their own needs," said Elizabeth D. Herman, a Fulbright scholar in Bangladesh who studied the treatment of 9/11 in Pakistan, India and 12 other countries.
Many Western European textbooks, she said, use 9/11 to highlight the perceived threat of Islamic extremism, with frequent references to "Islamic fundamentalism" or "Islamic terrorism."
But countries that see their own power as rising, like Brazil, China and India, are more apt to use 9/11 to criticize United States dominance in world affairs and emphasize the importance of multilateralism. Ms. Herman cited, for example, India's 2007 textbook "Contemporary World Politics" which said that after the attacks, "the U.S. forces made arrests all over the world, often without the knowledge of the government of the persons being arrested, transported these persons across countries, and detained them in secret prisons."
In the United States, most textbooks of the early 2000s portrayed the attacks as an occasion for patriotism and heroism - figuratively and literally - many using the Iwo Jima-like photograph of three firefighters raising a flag in the rubble of ground zero. That flag-raising, said Mary Ann Gundersen, an editorial director at Pearson, showed just what she wanted to capture: "resilience and defiance and hope and respect."
But a decade later, American textbooks are starting to use more graphic images of a plane slamming into the twin towers and erupting into a fireball, or panic in the streets as New Yorkers fled the roiling dust cloud that followed the towers' collapse.
Diana E. Hess, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, analyzed nine American high school textbooks that together are used by almost half of American students. She found that while they used dramatic labels ("horrendous plot" or "crime against humanity") to describe the attacks, they provided little information about what actually happened. Most of the textbooks did not even say how many people were killed or who was responsible for the attacks.
Even those that give some information may not provide enough context to make it understandable. One 2005 textbook, "America: Pathways to the Present," said the "prime suspect" in the attacks was Osama bin Laden, but described him only as "a wealthy Saudi dissident" who had been granted sanctuary in Afghanistan by the Taliban, a "group" that wanted to establish "their version of a pure Islamic state, banning such things as television and music."
"When you read the textbooks, it's hard to make sense of why this happened," Dr. Hess said. "There's a pretty big void in the narrative."
And the amount of specific information seems to be shrinking as the years go by - at least in the few textbooks that have had more than one post-9/11 edition. So while the 2005 edition of "The Americans" enumerated the deaths of the passengers in the four planes, the 300 firefighters and 40 police officers who rushed into the twin towers to rescue people, and so on, the 2010 edition was condensed to: "About 3,000 people were killed in the attacks - the most destructive acts of terrorism in modern history."
Similarly, the 2005 "Magruder's American Government," describing the decision to invade Iraq, said: "In 2002, Congress agreed that President Bush should take whatever measures were 'necessary and appropriate' to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi dictatorship. It was widely believed that that regime had amassed huge stores of chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to become a nuclear power - all in direct violation of the Gulf War's cease-fire agreement."
But the 2010 edition eliminated all mention of weapons of mass destruction.
While controversial public policy issues, like civil liberties and going to war, should be included in textbooks, Dr. Hess said, their absence is not surprising. "Textbook developers try to steer clear of controversy as much as possible," she said. "They know what happens when some committee somewhere picks up on some sentence that bugs someone."
Dr. Hess also criticized the textbooks for creating a false impression that most terrorist acts involved the United States, when, in fact, Western Europe and -- especially --Latin America have suffered far more terrorist attacks.
Many nations use the 9/11 attacks to highlight a new world order in which no single power is dominant.
In France, a government text introducing teachers to a new 11th-grade history curriculum that starts next year, called the 9/11 attacks "a terrorist act that ushers in a new era in international relations, marked by the definite abandonment of the belief in the capacity for a single State, be it endowed with all of the attributes of power, to ensure the stability of global order in an international environment in profound transformation."
In South Korea, the Kyohak Publishing textbook portrays the attacks as an illustration of the "clash of civilizations" described by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, with Western Europe gripped in "shock and anger" while "Palestine" had "people dancing on the street and celebrating." Some people, the textbook said, called for punishing "terrorism that killed innocent people," while there were others "who believed that terrorism is not always bad, who ask "in a way, can't we call nationalist activists terrorists? and who think that "there is morality in terrorism too."
A Chinese textbook published by the Beijing Normal University Publishing Group said that after "international terrorists" caused more than 3,000 deaths and more than $10 billion dollars in losses, the United States began the war in Afghanistan "and overthrew the Taliban regime in the name of fighting against terrorism. In 2003, without permission from the United Nations, the U.S. started the war in Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein's regime."
Establishing "a multipolar world," it concludes, will be a slow process.
In Hong Kong, the Education Bureau suggests having students role-play being the hijackers, World Trade Center workers, Afghan children, New York City police officers, Islamic citizens in Muslim countries and others.
In India, textbooks describe the American response to the attacks as a kind of cowboy justice that did not much defer to diplomacy. And in Indonesia and Israel, 9/11 has no place in the formal curriculum.
"Because there are so many different themes, so many things you can talk about, countries created narratives that met their own needs," said Elizabeth D. Herman, a Fulbright scholar in Bangladesh who studied the treatment of 9/11 in Pakistan, India and 12 other countries.
Many Western European textbooks, she said, use 9/11 to highlight the perceived threat of Islamic extremism, with frequent references to "Islamic fundamentalism" or "Islamic terrorism."
But countries that see their own power as rising, like Brazil, China and India, are more apt to use 9/11 to criticize United States dominance in world affairs and emphasize the importance of multilateralism. Ms. Herman cited, for example, India's 2007 textbook "Contemporary World Politics" which said that after the attacks, "the U.S. forces made arrests all over the world, often without the knowledge of the government of the persons being arrested, transported these persons across countries, and detained them in secret prisons."
In the United States, most textbooks of the early 2000s portrayed the attacks as an occasion for patriotism and heroism - figuratively and literally - many using the Iwo Jima-like photograph of three firefighters raising a flag in the rubble of ground zero. That flag-raising, said Mary Ann Gundersen, an editorial director at Pearson, showed just what she wanted to capture: "resilience and defiance and hope and respect."
But a decade later, American textbooks are starting to use more graphic images of a plane slamming into the twin towers and erupting into a fireball, or panic in the streets as New Yorkers fled the roiling dust cloud that followed the towers' collapse.
Diana E. Hess, an education professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, analyzed nine American high school textbooks that together are used by almost half of American students. She found that while they used dramatic labels ("horrendous plot" or "crime against humanity") to describe the attacks, they provided little information about what actually happened. Most of the textbooks did not even say how many people were killed or who was responsible for the attacks.
Even those that give some information may not provide enough context to make it understandable. One 2005 textbook, "America: Pathways to the Present," said the "prime suspect" in the attacks was Osama bin Laden, but described him only as "a wealthy Saudi dissident" who had been granted sanctuary in Afghanistan by the Taliban, a "group" that wanted to establish "their version of a pure Islamic state, banning such things as television and music."
"When you read the textbooks, it's hard to make sense of why this happened," Dr. Hess said. "There's a pretty big void in the narrative."
And the amount of specific information seems to be shrinking as the years go by - at least in the few textbooks that have had more than one post-9/11 edition. So while the 2005 edition of "The Americans" enumerated the deaths of the passengers in the four planes, the 300 firefighters and 40 police officers who rushed into the twin towers to rescue people, and so on, the 2010 edition was condensed to: "About 3,000 people were killed in the attacks - the most destructive acts of terrorism in modern history."
Similarly, the 2005 "Magruder's American Government," describing the decision to invade Iraq, said: "In 2002, Congress agreed that President Bush should take whatever measures were 'necessary and appropriate' to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi dictatorship. It was widely believed that that regime had amassed huge stores of chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to become a nuclear power - all in direct violation of the Gulf War's cease-fire agreement."
But the 2010 edition eliminated all mention of weapons of mass destruction.
While controversial public policy issues, like civil liberties and going to war, should be included in textbooks, Dr. Hess said, their absence is not surprising. "Textbook developers try to steer clear of controversy as much as possible," she said. "They know what happens when some committee somewhere picks up on some sentence that bugs someone."
Dr. Hess also criticized the textbooks for creating a false impression that most terrorist acts involved the United States, when, in fact, Western Europe and -- especially --Latin America have suffered far more terrorist attacks.
Many nations use the 9/11 attacks to highlight a new world order in which no single power is dominant.
In France, a government text introducing teachers to a new 11th-grade history curriculum that starts next year, called the 9/11 attacks "a terrorist act that ushers in a new era in international relations, marked by the definite abandonment of the belief in the capacity for a single State, be it endowed with all of the attributes of power, to ensure the stability of global order in an international environment in profound transformation."
In South Korea, the Kyohak Publishing textbook portrays the attacks as an illustration of the "clash of civilizations" described by the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, with Western Europe gripped in "shock and anger" while "Palestine" had "people dancing on the street and celebrating." Some people, the textbook said, called for punishing "terrorism that killed innocent people," while there were others "who believed that terrorism is not always bad, who ask "in a way, can't we call nationalist activists terrorists? and who think that "there is morality in terrorism too."
A Chinese textbook published by the Beijing Normal University Publishing Group said that after "international terrorists" caused more than 3,000 deaths and more than $10 billion dollars in losses, the United States began the war in Afghanistan "and overthrew the Taliban regime in the name of fighting against terrorism. In 2003, without permission from the United Nations, the U.S. started the war in Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein's regime."
Establishing "a multipolar world," it concludes, will be a slow process.
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