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How has education changed since September 11, 2001? Due to the Bush presidency and
the administrations that followed, the 9/11 terrorist attacks have become a pivotal
component of nationalist and patriotic identity in the U.S. public sphere. K-12 textbooks
have adopted this narrative whole-heartedly and their authors encourage students to
support any and all national responses to the terrorist attacks, especially those
that support the War on Terror. In doing so, educational material has revamped the
orientalist tropes about the Middle East that intensified during the Cold War across
America. In a post-9/11 world, the Middle East and the identities associated with
the terrorist attacks, specifically Arabs and Muslims, became increasingly flattened
into the enemy of the United States, to whom young nationals are told to exert their
patriotism against. Across numerous textbooks from the Cold War to today I examine
the racist and xenophobic outpourings of material, specifically pertaining to the
Middle East, Arabs, and Muslims. I then compare this discourse to the post-9/11 era,
and evaluate the changes and increased conflation of the region and its peoples with
terrorism and anti-Western sentiments. American education and textbooks are controlled
by white elitist and conservative voices who hold a primary interest in continued
domination of the region. While there are forms of resistance across schools in the
United States against this politically constructed narrative, specifically in Islamic
institutions, there is still so much work to be done to reify American identity within
education, without othering those blamed for the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
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