Post 9/11 children face diverse, fearful world

Professor Eileen Quinn Knight had been teaching future teachers at Saint Xavier University on Chicago’s Southwest Side for years before Sept. 11, 2001. But since that time, she has noticed the way things have changed—from the way schools teach about the world as part of their curriculum to the messages the students receive from the locked doors of their schools and the adults, always hovering nearby, always vigilant.

She discussed the ways education has changed with staff writer Michelle Martin.



The Catholic New World: What has changed in the way we treat children?

Eileen Quinn Knight: One of the things we need to do better is protect our children from news, to not have children watch the news unless there is a parent in the building, or in the living room or the dining room so that you can interpret the information. That’s one thing parents are much more attuned to—that children get information overload and have no idea what to do with the information.



TCNW: How has education of elementary students changed?

EQK: Previous to 9/11 we just took for granted a lot of things we talked about in our curriculum as far as history and geography and things like that, and after 9/11 we began to think about, how do we explain this to the child that globalization is taking place, that kids are beginning to realize that the world is a lot smaller than it was 20 years ago. Just the smallness of the world is something kids understand a lot more. Then we work on having them understand that different people in different sections of the world doesn’t mean they are a threat to us. They are different, and have different things they want to concentrate on. Eating differently and wearing different clothes is not a problem.

I think there’s an attitude in the school that’s kind of different, in terms of helping children accept people who don’t look like you, or eat different food or wear different clothes.



TCNW: How much of that is because of 9/11 and how much is because of increasing diversity?

EQK: I think 9/11 was a big push to make it more intentional. We intuitively understood there was more diversity before, but after 9/11 we became more intentional about understanding how people are different.



TCNW: What about in the way a school operates or the atmosphere of the school?

EQK: I think schools have become more fearful. More schools are locked; I have to come ahead of time to tell them I’m coming. They’re very much worried about the children’s safety, not just from 9/11 but from the school violence that’s happened. I think it’s good that schools are locked. But sometimes children feel there is some reason they should fear something because schools have so many locked positions. They want to make sure their parents are waiting at the door after school, or the bus is ready for them. …

They want to be supervised by an adult at all times, and they want to know that the adult knows what to do. When I was a child, it never crossed my mind that I should be afraid of anything. Today, it crosses kids’ minds. They’ve been exposed to so many things, in the media, in the news, in magazines, in newspapers. CNN has got every worst story there is. Kids who have that as white noise in their homes, they’ve got to be fearful of what’s going on.



TCNW: What about at the high school level? Have they changed also?

EQK: High schools are much stricter than even grade schools about who gets into the schools, and how they get in and why they get in and what they’re there for. When I walk up to a school, sometimes students will say, “What are you coming here for?” I’ll say, “Well, I’m going to help people with math,” and they’ll say, “You have to go in this door because there’s no other door that’s open.” There’s an apprehension of, what are the adults who are not teachers there for?

With what they’re teaching, I think history and geography classes have changed to look at the whole issue of globalization, of getting to know our neighbors, of realizing it isn’t somebody over there who’s doing something. It’s someone doing something right here in our backyard, causing buildings to fall down. They want to know what we as the United States are doing about it, other than the war in Iraq.



TCNW: Are kids more engaged in global questions?

EQK: I think they are more curious about them. I’m not sure they know what to do with them yet. What does that mean for the world of 2020? They’re not sure how its going to play out … they think things should be more controlled by the United States.



TCNW: It sounds like a continuation of what we talked about with elementary-age kids: “Somebody needs to be in charge here.”

EQK: Yes, and I think the sense that they can take care of themselves is important. Teachers’ goal is to empower the students so they can take care of their own lives. That can be a problem if they are brought up all through grade school with the idea that some adult is going to take care of them. To wean them from that in high school is going to be a difficult thing. Part of our issue in school is to make kids responsible for their emotional, spiritual well-being.



TCNW: What about higher education, where students will be more on their own and meeting more people from different places and cultures?

EQK: One of the things that has carried over to the college level is that parents are more involved. They come not only to the institute day, but they’re calling the kids every single day and finding out what they’re doing and how it’s going—what the media calls a “helicopter parent.”

We’re finding more involvement by the parents in the child’s life, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Young adults need to make their own decisions and their own mistakes and realize what it means to be of service to other people, to be compassionate to understand diversity.

After 9/11, what we saw with the college students, say from India, is they would say, “They think I’m from the Middle East, and I’m not,” so they felt more afraid than ever before because they were asked about their own ethnicity and origin where they wouldn’t be before. They thought of “Middle Eastern” as a problem.

I’m glad that one of our core values in Saint Xavier is diversity. We’re working on it with our students, with our faculty, to ascertain what’s the best way of understanding this diversity. One of the things we’re talked about is recognizing the gifts and abilities of all our students as different—not better or worse, but just different from each other. That’s a good take on what diversity really is in our society.



TCNW: It sounds like in some ways, kids are growing up too fast, but they’re all so growing up to slow.

EQK: They are growing up too fast, because they have too much information, but they are less mature. They are very sophisticated, but less mature than they’ve ever been. They com to us knowing a lot about things, but they haven’t had time to reflect and internalize that. It’s not necessarily a fault of theirs, but a fault of the culture in which they live.