What Have We Recovered?

Learning is about recovering.

We are flooded with information and we struggled to analyze the important bits and store them in memory.

Then, when the most precious moment arrives, we recover those precocious stored bits to save us from ourselves.

On the awful anniversary of 9/11, we now must begin to ask -- "What have we recovered?" -- in the steaming, soulless pit that used to be the World Trade Center.

Are we safer now than we were on 9/11?

Is the nation healthier and wealthier than we were then?

What values have been irreparably punctured?

Has our morality recovered from its rugged burning?

When we discuss the events of 9/11 with our students -- we must always press them to analyze the cause and effect for the event -- even if that process destroys our imperial high ground and threatens to sully the perceived pristine image of our nation as a series of clusters of cities on hills.

We must give our students the facts tempered with an international reality -- or in the end, we will have wagered everything on death and continued to recover nothing alive at all.