Schools Nationwide Are Using a 9/11 Curriculum That Erases the Terrorists

There’s something deeply unsettling about erasing the truth from history, and that’s exactly what’s happening in American classrooms right now. A nonprofit called the 9:57 Project has been feeding schools across the country a 9/11 curriculum that somehow manages to avoid mentioning Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or Islam. Yes, you read that correctly. We’re teaching kids about one of the most consequential attacks on American soil without telling them who did it or why.

The whole mess came to light when Fairfax County, Virginia got caught using lesson plans that prioritized “Responding to Racism, Hate, and Bias against Muslims and Middle Eastern People” as the first section of their 9/11 instruction. The curriculum told teachers to use a “critical lens” with students, which is just fancy talk for critical race theory. The stated reasoning? That commemorating 9/11 should focus on victims and heroes, not the attackers. That sounds noble until you realize they’re not just de-emphasizing the terrorists. They’re completely scrubbing them from the narrative.

Here’s the kicker. This isn’t just some fringe material being used in ultra-liberal districts. The 9:57 Project has worked with school systems in Kentucky and beyond, quietly replacing actual history with a sanitized version that reads more like emotional manipulation than education. Their 94-page curriculum mentions al-Qaeda exactly once, and only in passing when describing a soldier who was “fighting in the mountains of Afghanistan against al-Qaeda.” The word Islam doesn’t appear at all.

Think about what we’re doing here. We’re creating an entire generation of Americans who don’t know basic facts about the defining attack of the 21st century. When PragerU went to college campuses and asked students who attacked us on 9/11, many couldn’t answer. One kid, clearly embarrassed by his own ignorance, guessed Israel. These aren’t stupid kids. They’re products of an education system that decided certain truths were too uncomfortable to teach.

Former Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares nailed it when he said this would be like teaching Pearl Harbor without mentioning Japan. Actually, it’s worse than that. At least with Pearl Harbor, students would probably figure out who attacked us through basic cultural osmosis. But 9/11 happened over two decades ago now, and if we don’t teach it honestly, kids simply won’t know.

The people behind this curriculum aren’t dumb either. Peter Findler and John Hamilton, who founded the 9:57 Project, understood something important about how schools work. Teachers are overworked and understaffed. If you package up a free, ready-to-use lesson plan and market it as coming from authoritative sources, they’ll use it. It’s the same playbook the 1619 Project used to inject revisionist history into classrooms nationwide.

What’s the justification for all this? Some on the left worry that identifying the terrorists as Islamist extremists might reflect poorly on all Muslims. But that argument falls apart immediately. Even if you wanted to tiptoe around ideology, why wouldn’t you name the actual people who planned and executed the attacks? Osama bin Laden isn’t a religion. He was a specific man who orchestrated specific murders. Al-Qaeda isn’t a faith. It’s a terrorist organization responsible for killing nearly 3,000 Americans.

The Fairfax situation is especially galling because the county sits just miles from the Pentagon, where 184 people died when terrorists flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the building. Thousands of military families live in Fairfax County. These are people who served in the wars that followed, who lost friends and family members in the fight against the very terrorists this curriculum refuses to name. Only one of twelve school board members objected to this curriculum. One.

You know what really gets me? The sheer audacity of thinking you can just memory-hole historical facts because they might make someone uncomfortable. Education isn’t supposed to be comfortable. It’s supposed to be true. When we teach the Holocaust, we name the Nazis. When we teach slavery, we name the slaveholders. When we teach about terrorism, we should name the terrorists.

This isn’t about stirring up hate against Muslims. Most Muslims condemned the attacks and have nothing to do with terrorism. But pretending the attackers had no ideology, no names, no organizational backing doesn’t protect anyone. It just creates ignorance, and ignorance never made anyone safer.

The solution here is simple. Schools need to ditch these politically sanitized curricula and teach actual history. Tell students who attacked us. Explain why they did it. Discuss how we responded and what lessons we learned. If educators can’t handle that level of honesty, they’re in the wrong profession. Our kids deserve better than historical amnesia dressed up as sensitivity training.

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