September 11th happened to be our second day of school. A little before ten I went to the kitchen in search of a cup of Sleepy Time tea to soothe the effects of the electric energy that always pulses through the building in the opening week. The cook was sobbing. Caroline was brand new, leaving me clueless as to the possible cause of her upset. Somewhat hesitantly I asked, and unable to find words, she simply pointed to the radio. In that instant I joined the millions who were catching early, sketchy reports of some kind of aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center. I rushed — tealess — back to the 7th and 8th grade classroom to log onto the Internet and try to obtain more detailed information. All of the major news outlets were jammed, however, due to the flood of traffic.

So I grabbed my students — there were only seven this year — and hurried around the corner to the TV set in my living room. Ten minutes later, there we sat viewing the first tower crumble sickeningly to earth. It was the surreal image that the networks would incessantly bombard our psyches with over the next seventy-two hours. Only we had just seen it in real time. I watched with one eye on the screen and one on my students, wondering if they were aware that they weren't watching a movie. Their stunned silence told me they knew this was no act. One boy, suddenly realizing that a friend of the family worked in one of the towers, began to cry quietly.

At noon we returned to school for lunch, and afterwards we gathered the whole school together, as we would do many times in the days to come, to talk about the tragic events in New York and Washington. The first priority was to assure the children that we were safe. The next was to pray for the victims. The kids' many excellent questions were met with honest, factual answers. (A few weeks later, after the anthrax scare had been added to the mix of terror, a visiting public school teacher would note with amazement how little residual fear our students seemed to be carrying.)

The circle slowly began to shrink as frightened parents showed up to take their children home early. The cloudless, Pacific-blue skies over Albany had grown strangely silent. It was a bizarre day.

The following morning one group of students accompanied their teacher up to the now heavily guarded state office complex while he donated blood. Another began constructing wooden crosses to contribute to an impromptu memorial behind the school. In the ensuing days, there were more questions and more honest, factual answers. More expressions of grief and sympathy.

Around the nation, observers reported a huge spike in church attendance, and people everywhere began committing random acts of kindness in unprecedented numbers. It was as though we had all gotten a collective message. I call this phenomenon September 12th.

This morning as I write this, the last standing girder from the remains of the Twin Towers has just been removed by the demolition crews. Officials have declared the site "cleaned up." Consensus is building around the idea of turning the entire complex into some kind of permanent memorial.

But more recently church attendance has returned to pre-September 11th levels. Selfishness and cynicism appear to have securely reattached themselves to the American soul.

Why?

The reasons are legion of course, but as a schoolteacher and administrator, my attention naturally turns toward the culture of education. For better and for worse, it inexorably shapes the attitudes and values of our young. What I see is anything but heartening. The last surviving remnants of heartfulness and soulfulness are steadily being ground out of the educational process by the demands for performance and achievement at any cost — reminding me of the stories of numerous workers in those doomed towers on the morning of the 11th that were reluctant to leave their offices. (Who would man the phones? Who would safeguard the money?)

The reign of the fear mongers is in full swing. Test scores are down. The sky is falling. Keep the children on task. Information is everything. Our schools have become stress laboratories, busily preparing the next generation of workers whose only focus will be business as usual. Emotional awareness is now an occasional curriculum item, pop quizzes and all. The opportunities for children to pause, reflect, and care about each other and the world around them have all but been eliminated from the crowded school day.

I, too, support the idea of a memorial on the tip of Manhattan, as a way of promoting a perpetual September 12th when everyone's hearts are softened by love and compassion.

But today at least, I fear those thousands died in vain.

[click here to contact Chris]