As someone who was born in 1997 and is therefore too young to remember 9/11 happening despite being alive when it did, and who also isn’t American, this is something I’ve always wondered. I totally get for example adults at home or people in office jobs wanting to know wtf was going on and therefore putting the news on, and I totally get that due to it being pre-social media the news as to what was actually happening didn’t spread quickly and there was a lot of fear and confusion as to what was happening. However I don’t understand why there are accounts of so many school children across the USA witnessing the second plane impact, or the towers collapsing, on live TV as their teachers had put the news on and had them all watching it.

Not only is it really odd to me to stop an entire class to do this, unless maybe you were in the closer NY area so were trying to find information out for safety/potential transport disruption, I also don’t understand why even if you were in that area, why you would want to get a bunch of often very young children sit and watch something that could’ve been quite scary or upsetting for them. Especially because at the beginning when the first plane hit, a lot of people seemed to just think it was a legitimate accidental plane crash before the second plane hit. I genuinely just want to understand the reasonings behind teachers and schools deciding to do this.

At least when the challenger exploded it made sense why kids were watching. With 9/11 I’m still scratching my head.