But on Sept. 11, 2001, Katie Holmes was a little girl in fourth grade. Today, as a 17-year-old junior attending Bingham High School, Holmes admits she's sketchy on the historic details, but eager to learn more.

"I know it was historic, but in a bad way," Holmes said. "It was terrorists from the Middle East who did it - I think. The war in Iraq is probably part of it."

As the nation approaches the seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in which 19 Arab men hijacked four planes in a suicide mission that resulted in the loss of 2,979 lives and left more than 6,200 injured, Utah high school history teachers are polishing lectures and presentations on what remains the United States' most central historic event of 21st century.

"I really go all out, because for this generation nothing else comes close, even if now most of my students remember it only from grade school," said Jose Bernardo Fanjul, an honors teacher in U.S. history at West High School, who will start four days of lessons and class assignments on the attacks on Thursday.

Unlike teaching the Middle Ages or even the Vietnam War, teaching 9/11 comes prepackaged with its own risks and rewards. Many high school students respond to learning about it enthusiastically, Utah history teachers say, because for many it's the central historic event of their lifetime. Cast that discussion across the national debate over how to respond to terrorism, questions about the the Iraq war, and the contentious topic of Middle East politics and Islam, though, and the difficulties of teaching the event become clear. There's also the challenge of teaching what is still a relatively current event as history.

"What you're asking for is a tall order," said Bradley Parker, an associate professor with the University of Utah's Middle East Center.

Tackling terrorism: Just because Sept. 11 is not included in the state's core social studies curriculum doesn't mean Utah teachers aren't happy to rise to the task.

Bingham High School history teacher Charron Mason uses a light touch, either through student discussion in her U.S. history class, or lessons in her finance class, where students learn about emergency measures the Federal Reserve took to ensure the flow of money in a time of emergency. Others, such as Scott Crump, also a teacher at Bingham High School, tackle it with gusto, teaching an entire unit on terrorism alone for students in his U.S. history and Advanced Placement political science classes.

For Crump, modern terrorism begins with the 1972 Olympic Munich massacre of Israeli athletes, but he also takes students back to the French revolution's "reign of terror," and includes brief forays into terrorism in the Northern Ireland conflict. Rather than proffer his views on recent history as accepted fact, he encourages students to make their own arguments, as long as they can back them up with sources and evidence.

"There are students who cling to the idea that Iraq was harboring terrorists, and that was justification enough for the war," Crump said. "That's fine, but I stress that they must have evidence. That's the beauty of history. It allows us to look back in time for evidence to determine what really happened."

Fanjul uses Sept. 11 as an opportunity to let his students steer a course for themselves. Often they end up in heated discussion about immigration, because the hijackers perpetrating the attacks all came from outside the United States. Fanjul also presents students with a 40-minute video documenting the lives of Muslim teenagers across the world to show that very few Muslims rallied around Osama bin Laden following the attacks.

"We try to use it as a platform to teach political activity and tolerance," Fanjul said. "It's a great moment to start teaching other issues. We can take it and run with it in almost any direction."

Digging up facts: History textbooks used in both Fanjul's and Mason's classes - "The Americans" published by McDougal Littell and "America: Pathways to the Present" published by Prentice Hall, respectively - cover the Sept. 11 attacks in as much as 14 pages, and as few as four. Both focus on the attacks' chronological events, then follow their impact on the formation of the Department of Homeland Security, on through to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Neither book, however, mentions terrorists' motive in carrying out the attacks, aside from a cursory mention in "The Americans" stating that they were extremists "opposed to American influence in Muslim lands."

Peter von Sivers, an associate professor at the University of Utah's Middle East Center, said teachers shouldn't underestimate the value of teaching those motives, however controversial. "The first obligation a teacher has is to make it clear that ideas, whether secular or religious, can drive actions on their own," he said.

In an age when many U.S. adults still believe Saddam Hussein played a part in carrying out the Sept. 11 attacks, however, teaching the facts of that terrible day alone still carry value.

"We need to break through the political fog that politicians had been spreading when they were groping for justifications [for invading Iraq]," von Sivers said. "Students need to learn that politicians often grasp at anything, and that if you repeat a lie enough, people will believe it."

bfulton@sltrib.com