“Remember” is the buzz-word of the month. The fifth of November dared not be forgotten, and now fresh brigades of poppy peddlers are signalling the eminent approach of the rather unequivocally named Remembrance Day. Yet come the 11th of November, the ninety-third anniversary of the WWI Armistice, what thoughts will fill our minds as the clock chimes eleven and we stop to reflect for those long old sixty seconds? How many empty, pensive gazes will be concealed under the masking parades of red floral wreaths, glorified military members, and token paper poppies?

The task of remembrance holds an uneasy place in the hands of the post-memory generation. Entirely severed from the realities of last century’s World Wars, Remembrance Day can mean little to the children of peace-time Britain, my minute silence sure to be plagued with irresistible, distracting thoughts of pending essay deadlines and my next fix of Bengal Spice tea, perhaps even set to a token Rule Britannia soundtrack.

This is not for want of trying; but the engagement with an alien and ever-distancing past can be both a daunting and perilous task. Ultimately, it is education upon which we rely to help keep that past alive, to give it the relevance and pertinence that a semi-glorifying, self-congratulating memorial service cannot provide.

We have only to cross the Atlantic and substitute our wearisome poppy red for an entire Crayola pack’s worth of colouring tools to observe this preoccupation with the postmemory generation in the light of a more recent historical event. The issue of remembrance stormed US headlines this September in the lead up to the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 as the publication of an educational children’s graphic colouring book, We Shall Never Forget 9/11 provoked controversy over its presentation of an overtly coloured history [in every sense of the word].

Since when have terrorism and violence been considered topoi in the world of children’s literature? With fierce depictions of a navy SEAL shooting Osama Bin Laden, the book proves itself to be insensitive and inappropriate in both content and form, taking the act of remembrance through education to an almost farcical extreme, targeting children who are too young to comprehend the personal horrors and political implications of 9/11. What results is the distressing trivialisation of significant historical matter.

Moreover, it forfeits its position as an unbiased history through its palpable Christian stance, which additionally has resulted in the anger of the Council on American-Islamic Relations’ over what they see as a discriminatory portrayal of Islam.

“The intent of the book is to educate, and that’s what it does”, states publisher Wayne Bell- but this text clearly oversteps the line between education and downright indoctrination. The child’s encouragement to interact creatively through colour is no more than a veil of deception, a mere token gesture in the light of the book’s paradoxically black and white delineation of history. “We are FREE and our society is FREE”, the text states, yet the reader’s freedom to engage with the controversies and interpretations of the past is negated as they are forced to colour within the lines of a predetermined interpretation of the past.

Furthermore, the almost belligerently patriotic appraisal of the USA as a “peace loving wonderful nation” just so happens to ignore the fact that the country has found itself in continuous conflict for the last ten years, demonstrating the misleading, misinforming and therefore dangerous voice of this narrative.

And to cap it all off, the idea of thousands of children coming home from school to set to work not on whimsical cartoon doodles but on their personal interpretation of Osama Bin Laden’s beard is a disturbing, and quite frankly, terrifying thought. Surely, oh surely, this is not the right way to be teaching the next generation about 9/11?

The remembrance of the past continues to, and will forever play a fundamental part in our future. At the same time, no one wants to live in the shadows of disaster; to look towards a future strangled by the tight-reigned grip of the past. However, as George Santayana once stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

Thus, indeed, forget us not. Engaging with a distancing past is a challenge to be embraced, however desperately pushing warped historical memories onto such young, impressionable minds is clearly not the way to go about it. It is time therefore to take hold of the reins on our futures, before we all are trapped inside the lines of a colouring book of our own collective history.