"Never forget" became a national rallying cry after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Yet America's schools — where collective memory is shaped — are now full of students who never knew because they weren't alive then. Many teachers now struggle with whether and how to teach the attacks and their aftermath.

According to one survey, only about 20 states include anything in depth about the events of that fateful day in their high school social studies curriculum.

"It was a really big part of other people's lives. I wasn't born then," says Kaylah Eggsware, a seventh-grader at Greenfield Middle School in Greenfield, Mass. "I don't know about it, so I don't know how to feel about it."

But that's changing. This school year, Greenfield students, as well as their teachers and administrators, are being asked to read and discuss a new young adult novel called Towers Falling by Jewell Parker Rhodes.

Duckworth found that if Sept. 11 is addressed in classrooms, too often teachers don't want to tackle the complex, often ugly aftermath at home and globally: the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; the Patriot Act and civil liberties; radical Islam and Islamophobia.

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