The students filed into their social studies class just after lunch and slumped into desks where they had learned about the Civil War, Lewis and Clark, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. On this day, teacher Michael Hutchison said, the class would feature “another of those huge moments in our history”. He dimmed the lights and played a video on the classroom TV.

On the screen at the front of the room, a skyscraper burned. A woman screamed. A tower crumbled. A mother sobbed as she recalled her son’s final words.

“There was a fire,” one student wrote in his notes.

“People died and went missing,” scribbled another.

Eight years later, this is an example of what September 11, 2001, has become for a generation that’s too young to remember much, if anything, about that day: It is an educational DVD, a 167-page textbook, a black binder of class handouts titled A National Interdisciplinary Curriculum. In Room C215 at Lincoln High School, images of the collapsing Manhattan skyline are now a classroom “warm-up exercise”.

Anthony Gardner, whose brother died on the 83rd floor of the World Trade Center’s North Tower, conceived of a September 11 curriculum as a tribute to the victims. He partnered with two professors in Manhattan, who partnered with an education company in San Francisco, which partnered with a cadre of researchers and copy editors, who sent the final product to a handful of test schools nationwide last week.

One copy was mailed to Hutchison, 53, a longtime history teacher in Vincennes who has never visited New York City. Hutchison had been chosen to help roll out the curriculum because of his reputation for bringing multimedia history lessons to a school edged by cornfields near the Illinois border.

... contd.