The Sept. 11 attacks took place 3-6 years before today’s high school students were born.

While they may have no personal connection to the historic event, they have access to much more information than students did 20 years ago, connecting them with the significance of that day.

“For these kids it’s a history event. For us, we lived through it. They don’t know, they weren’t alive, and we just have to teach it in some cases,” said Paul McArdle, a social studies teacher at Palmerton Area High School.

Today’s students look at 9/11 as a historical event. When they come into the classroom, many know only what they’ve heard from their parents. It’s similar to the perspective that Gen X and millennials had on the Kennedy assassination from their parents.

“I used to start my lesson by asking, ‘Where were you when 9/11 happened,’ and they’d talk about that. Now, we’ll start with ‘what do you know about 9/11?’?” said Connie Segedy, a social studies teacher at Tamaqua Area Senior High School. “It doesn’t have the same meaning that it once did.”

One advantage today’s students have over children of previous generations is access to a much more vast base of information, especially videos, which can take them back to 2001.

Nearly every grade level teaches lessons on 9/11, and they can use documentaries and actual 2001 news broadcasts to impart what happened.

At Palmerton, all high school students watch the documentary “9/11.” The crew happened to be making a movie about New York City firefighters when they saw the first plane strike the tower, and documented the actions of the firefighters throughout that day. This year, they will have a special assembly for all students, where they will view videos from the 9/11 memorial foundation.

At Panther Valley, they have annual assemblies where they remember those who died on 9/11. Social studies teacher Josh Wank also tries to make the connection between 9/11 and the threat of terrorism around the world.

“Just because the country dealing with a terrorist group isn’t the United States, it still hits home for us because we felt that pain, we felt that loss,” he said.

One of the challenges of educating students about the events of 9/11 is relating to the emotional impact. Students born after 9/11 have always grown up knowing that there was a deadly terrorist attack in recent U.S. history, so it can be more difficult to grasp how it changed life.

“We try to give them that feeling, we try to get them to grasp the magnitude of what happened that day,” said Mike Feifel, a social studies teacher at Lehighton Area High School.

Students in 2001 witnessed the largest attack by any foreign entity on U.S. soil. They gathered around televisions, and stayed there for more than a day after. Some cried from the stress of the event. One of the things that stood out to teachers who were in the classroom then was how collectively engaged their students were with the news, which can be rare. They asked questions about the politics of the Middle East, and the relationship with U.S. foreign policy.

“The kids had 1,000 questions, and really wanted to know the answers. You hate to say it but it was a great teaching day because it was so tense,” McArdle said.

There is no doubt that if a 9/11-scale attack occurred in 2021, that students would have a much different experience. The same technology that can instantly show them news reports from 20 years ago has also changed how they react to traumatic events. Segedy, a parent of two high school students herself, said that today’s students aren’t fazed as easily as students in the past. They have access to the whole world at their fingertips.

“Today, they would know before me that it happened,” Segedy said.