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Teaching 9/11, JFK assassination, and ET life as academic critical thinking case studies

The following is my best academic approach for how academic professionals interested in controversial current events and history can teach them. When I teach history courses, I open the conversation with a challenge to students: “If you could know anything in history, if you could learn what really happened, what would you want to know?” I have them think, reflect, and then offer to have supplemental teaching units on whatever the class votes as their topics of greatest interest as a “reward” if their academic progress in the regular curriculum is on-pace and meets our academic target for class GPA success as a class (economics of incentives in action).

The purpose of this assignment is to teach the tools of history of who, did what, when, where, and the approach to learn additional facts of the preceding for students to make their own analysis to respond to the subjective question of “why” on topics with strong intrinsic interest for students.

Historically, high school students most want to know the following, in mixed cases of highest interest, but with votes accumulated on these four topics and general ways of posing the questions:

1. Is Christianity historically true? What really happened with Jesus? Who was he really?
2. Was 9/11 an “inside job”? What is our government lying about 9/11 and why? What really happened on 9/11?
3. Who assassinated President Kennedy? If the government is lying about the assassination, why?
4. Is there extra-terrestrial life (ET)? Are UFOs real? Have ETs interacted with human evolution, and if so, what is the evidence and what is the effect?

I’ve asked this question for close to twenty years now. The 9/11 question has been a leader since ~2004. Because the answers to Christianity are in my understanding non-controversial, as Jesus is the most-studied individual in history by professional historians, I simply provide the source material we have for this individual’s recorded life and allow students to discuss, and draw their own interpretations and policy positions (what each should do with this information). The basic information is in the article I wrote, Christmas: a paradox of sources about Jesus, ancient myths, astronomy, and winter solstice.

For 9/11, JFK, and ET existence, I’ve created a lesson that allows readers to examine what I’ve constructed in good faith as best evidence for both counter-government and pro-government positions. Here is that lesson; anyone is welcome to use it in classrooms. It reproduces onto 6 double-sided pages to give to students. Feel free to e-mail me for the Word version; it contains quotes from leading Americans that made the article too long to print on Examiner.com.

Whole article here:
http://dailycensored.com/2010/11/07/teaching-911-jfk-assassination-and-et-life-as-academic-critical-thinking-case-studies/