Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen

Someone remind me to hug my high school history teacher. According to Lies My Teacher Told Me, he would be one of the few who were capable of and who did an excellent job, in spite of having to teach from a sub-par textbook. In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen examines twelve of the most used high school history textbooks (including the one I used) and concludes that not a single one makes history interesting or memorable, and that they're also guilty of the sin of omission in many important areas.

One of my favorite chapters deals with the concept of hero building, where textbooks take prominent figures and completely whitewash anything negative or controversial. Not only is this lying, but it also gives the students who are learning about these people the false impression that they can never be or accomplish anything like these perfect people. Helen Keller was a radical socialist (we're talking practically left of Lenin here, while Woodrow Wilson was a racist who considered Birth of a Nation to be totally factual, and Christopher Columbus didn't actually discover anything and is responsible for a genocide. These things don't necessarily discredit the positive things that these people brought to the world (nor does Loewen want to discredit them), but it is dishonest to present their lives as one way when they were decidedly another -indeed, at least one text blatantly lies about Wilson's racism and feelings toward African Americans.

History gives us the possibility to learn from the past. However, when events are presented in a vacuum, with the events of chapter 8 having little to do with chapter 9, that affect is lost. For example, in many texts Reconstruction is treated with kid gloves, ostensibly to not hurt the south's feelings (as though anyone who participated in it is still living) and in some cases students are actually lied to and told that the freed slaves were put in charge of Southern state legislatures and messed things up so badly that whites had to take charge once again. Ha! That Reconstruction led to segregation and Jim Crow laws, which led to the Civil Rights movement, which has led to affirmative action is lost to all but those who are curious enough to learn more from other sources.

Obviously, I really enjoyed this book. As someone who hopes to teach history one day I've become inspired to be better than the material given to me. The only criticisms I have are that occasionally Loewen drags the subject on for too long, to the point where I'm going "I get it, I get it" and that the chapters on subjects I've always found boring: Columbus, early exploration, etc. were uninteresting to me. I can't exactly fault Loewen for not making interested in something I've never liked, just as I couldn't fault Paula Deen for not making corn anything but gross to me.

All in all I loved the feeling of being simultaneously enthralled by things I didn't know about, like secret wars with Russia, and disgusted while reading, verbatim, some of the outright lies that so many students are raught. Loewen knows what he's talking about and hopefully, with some future textbook rewrites, other people will, too.

http://thechickmanifesto.blogspot.com/2009/04/lies-my-teacher-told-me-by-james-w.html