Media Blog on National Review Online What the BBC is telling children about the 9/11 attacks [Tom Gross]

Here is what the BBC’s widely-read children’s section of their website (CBBC) is telling kids about the 9/11 attacks, the 6th anniversary of which falls today.

It is not quite the al-Qaeda view, but it almost is.

When I saw this intro I expected this to be another hawkish rant but was surprised that it wasn’t that far off. While I’m all for presenting the al-Qaeda point of view alongside others, the BBC did it without making it clear whose views it was presenting. Now, this is more interesting from an educational and cognitive than political point of view. I can see the editorial policy of the site is to present things simply without too many counterfactuals. While children may have problems processing some complex counterfactual sentences, they are not incapable of processing perspectives from about the age 6-8 (and writing about 9/11 for children younger than that is a waste of time). And the language of the text is convoluted anyway so a typical child would have trouble making any sense out of it.

The way America has got involved in conflicts in regions like the Middle East has made some people very angry, including a group called al-Qaeda - who are widely thought to have been behind the attacks.

Who on Earth would think this is child-friendly language? It requires rather a lot of attention and focus and navigation of mental spaces. How about: "Many people are angry because America often tries to influence what their countries do." But even better, how about:

"It is often difficult to say why people do things. It is also difficult to say why some people hate other people. One explanation is ... . The people who did 9/11 say they did it because ... . The American president says it was because ... . Some social scientists say it was because ... . You will have to make a difficult decision about whose view you support."

I'm sure this could be cleaned up further but miles better than a sentence with a complicated mental space structure, like the BBC's:

When the attacks happened in 2001, there were a number of US troops in a country called Saudi Arabia, and the leader of al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, said he wanted them to leave.

I particularly like the "country called Saudi Arabia" as a nod to a text that is suitable for children in a sentence that clearly isn't. Plus the comma before 'said'? Have they no shame? Children are good at processing stories, so tell them a story but this is a story summary for adults who already know what happened in a way that tries to look simple and isn't.