Just as it was in New York, it was a sunny, end-of-summer day in London, one of those pale golden afternoons that seem to hold the last warmth of the season before everything turns. I was heavily pregnant, my body heavy and unfamiliar, and the heat had drained every last ounce of energy from me. I lay down on the sofa in front of the television, letting the low hum of daytime programming wash over me, and within minutes I had slipped into one of those thick, dreamless naps that pregnancy seems to demand. I cannot say what woke me. Perhaps it was the change in the newsreader’s voice, a sudden crack of disbelief; perhaps it was something in the silence that fell between sentences. I opened my eyes to see smoke rising from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and for a long moment my mind refused to arrange the images into a story. A passenger plane, they said. A terrible accident. I tried to hold on to that explanation, but then I watched a second plane fly across a blue sky I will never forget and burst into the South Tower. There was no more room for comfortable explanations. This was deliberate. This was an act of terrorism, unfolding live on my television while the baby inside me turned and kicked. In 102 minutes the towers collapsed, and dust and paper and ash filled the streets of New York. 2,977 people were killed. I remember sitting in the strange quiet of my own living room, the kettle cold, the afternoon unfinished, and feeling as though the ground of the world had shifted. I kept thinking about the people who had woken up that morning with ordinary plans, ordinary worries, ordinary love, and about the families waiting for phone calls that would never come. A few weeks later my son was born, and I looked into his wrinkled, curious face and wondered what kind of world I had brought him into.
This week, as the anniversary arrives again, my son is nearly twenty-five years old. The baby who kicked inside me on that terrible morning has grown into a man, and he has no memory of September 11 2001. He never saw the smoke, never heard the unsteady voices of news presenters, never watched the towers fall in real time. For him, and for every student sitting in a school today, 9/11 is not a memory. It is history, as remote as the assassination of John F Kennedy or the end of the Cold War. Many of the teachers trying to explain it were not yet born, or were so small that they remember only their parents’ expressions and the strange sense of suspended time. This distance is natural, inevitable, but it creates a real challenge. How do we teach a tragedy that is slipping out of living memory? Why should a teenager who grew up with smartphones care about an event that happened before they existed? The answer is that 9/11 did not end when the towers fell. It has continued, every day since, to shape the world they live in. It shaped British politics and foreign policy, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the way we travel and secure our borders, the way we think about surveillance, privacy and civil liberties. It has affected how Muslims and migrant communities are seen and treated in Britain. It has shaped the language of extremism and radicalisation that pulses through news headlines and dinner table conversations. It is woven into the fabric of the twenty-first century. To understand 9/11 is to understand the ground beneath their feet, and that is why we cannot simply let it fade into the past.
But while the reasons for remembering 9/11 remain urgent, the way young people learn about it has changed beyond recognition. In 2001, most of us did not search for information; we received it. We watched the evening news, listened to the radio, read the morning newspapers. There were limits, of course, but there was also a shared sense that the facts mattered. Today, a young person scrolling through their phone at midnight is likely to meet 9/11 through a TikTok video set to moody music, a YouTube short that compresses the attacks into ninety seconds, an Instagram infographic with a black background, a meme that turns grief into irony, or a group chat where someone shares a link from a conspiracy account. The algorithm does not care whether what they share is true. It cares whether it keeps them watching. It pushes the dramatic, the outraged, the surprising, and it never pauses to add context. A complex event, involving nineteen hijackers, thousands of victims, intelligence failures, geopolitics, faith and hatred, heroism and mistakes, can be flattened into a single claim: this is what happened, or even, this is a lie. I have watched my own son navigate this landscape, and I know how hard it is to find a stable point in all that noise. It is not enough to ask whether a video is true. Young people also need to ask who benefits from making something go viral, whose story is included, whose story is erased, and what emotional button is being pressed. That is why education must start by acknowledging the digital world rather than pretending it away. Without those questions, history is just a feed.
At SINCE 9/11, we have learned that this generation is not indifferent. They are curious, often intensely so, but they are also drowning in a sea of competing stories. When we recently asked students what they valued most about our 9/11 workshops, their answers surprised us. They did not mention the overview or the historical timeline. They talked about hearing other people’s opinions, analysing social media, weighing evidence, and hearing a survivor’s story. They wanted to feel the texture of the past, not just know its shape. They wanted to be trusted with different perspectives and complex truths. Their teachers see the same need. They tell us that 9/11 provides invaluable context for understanding today’s world, but they also tell us about the conspiracy theories their students bring into the classroom, sometimes as a one-off thought, sometimes as a deeply held belief. Twenty-five years after the attacks, there are young people in British schools who believe the official account is a lie, that 9/11 was an inside job, that the towers were brought down by controlled demolition, that the whole thing was staged to justify war. These beliefs do not appear from nowhere; they grow in the gaps left by old media and the echo chambers of new media. Teachers are not miracle workers. They cannot undo years of misinformation in a single lesson. But they can create a space where evidence is examined, where questions are allowed, and where a survivor’s testimony can stand beside a critical reading of a YouTube video. That is the work our charity is trying to do. We are not there to tell students what to think. We are there to help them notice how thinking works, so they can decide what to do with it.
That is why SINCE 9/11 has evolved beyond teaching the bare facts of the attacks. Of course, young people should know what happened on that bright September morning. They should understand the scale of the loss, the 2,977 people who were killed, not as a statistic but as a very human number. They should know the stories of the office worker who called her husband and said she loved him, the firefighter who ran up the stairs while others ran down, the passenger on the plane who asked a stranger for a blessing. The human story is the foundation of everything else. But teaching 9/11 today has to go further. It means giving young people permission to ask the difficult questions they are often afraid to voice: why did this happen, who did this, why does it still matter. It means letting them listen to perspectives from outside their own experience, including from people whose lives were made worse in the aftermath, and encouraging them to hold complexity without collapsing into easy answers. It means teaching them to distinguish between an assertion and a piece of evidence, between a viral post and a primary source, between a claim designed to make them feel and a claim designed to make them think. A classroom should be a place where a student can say “I am not sure” without being mocked, and where every difficult question is met with respect. It does not mean telling them what to think. I have spent enough time in classrooms to know that telling people what to think rarely works, and when it does, it creates only brittle loyalty. The purpose of education is not to produce a single conclusion. It is to produce the ability to reach conclusions honestly, with knowledge and confidence, without being manipulated by whoever shouts loudest or makes the most watchable video.
When I watched the towers fall twenty-five years ago, I was not thinking about charities or schools or workshops. I was thinking about the child inside me and the world he would grow up in, and I wondered whether that world would ever feel safe again. I had never experienced anything like that moment. I could not have imagined that, a quarter of a century later, my own child would be nearly twenty-five, and that my work would involve helping another generation understand something I had watched happen live. Sometimes I feel as if the past and the present have folded together. I am still the frightened, heavily pregnant woman sitting in front of the television, and I am also the woman leading workshops where teenagers debate the reliability of a social media post. I know we cannot expect today’s children to share our memories. They will never know exactly how the air felt that morning, or how the world seemed to stop, or how we all clung to the news for hours, desperate to understand. They will never have that visceral, painful intimacy with the day. But we can make sure they understand what happened, and why it still matters, and why the 2,977 people who died were more than names in a memorial. We can help them question misinformation, challenge hatred and extremism, and listen to perspectives other than their own. We can give them the tools to navigate the world they have inherited, a world shaped by the choices made after 9/11 and by the fears, hopes and divisions those choices created. We want them to ask questions before deciding, to be sceptical of certainty, and to understand that history is not a weapon. That is not an act of nostalgia. It is an act of love for the future. My son was born into that future, and so were all the students sitting in classrooms today. The least we can do is help them meet it with open eyes, strong minds and compassionate hearts.