Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James W. Loewen

I love history.  One of the reasons I was attracted to Williamsburg (other than the opportunity to work at a fantastic library), was that I’d be surrounded by the early history of what would become the United States.  But the way history is taught to kids dissatisfied me, although I couldn’t articulate it until I got to college.  Even then I didn’t have the sufficiently detailed perspective to point out what I thought was wrong.

James W. Loewen puts his finger right on the problem in Lies My Teacher Told Me: the textbooks used to lay the foundation of our country’s past, its present, and most important, its future.  Unfortunately, textbook publishers seem to think that teachers and students in middle and high school are dumb, and they write the narrative of our history with that understanding.  What schools wind up with, then, is about as bland and challenging as a helping of dehydrated mashed potatoes, perfect for the ScanTron testing that has replaced genuine education in this country.  (You’ll notice that I included teachers in the low estimate of the publishers.  The shock title is belied by the book’s subtitle–Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. Loewen is generous in his praise of teachers who struggle to educate in spite of the six pound millstones around their necks.)

Loewen lays out examples from Columbus through the Iraq War to demonstrate the omissions and out-and-out fabrications making their way into the classroom materials that unwary students accept as gospel.  Those examples, which are scandalous enough, illustrate the real scandal–that from first to last textbook publishers set out to deceive.

• Start with the authors: respected academics who have taken on the noble mission of nurturing budding citizens and future historians.  Whoops–the only place their work appears is on the cover and the endorsement of their paychecks.
• With the imprimatur of those “educators,” the publishers hire out the actual work, often to anonymous hacks who may never have studied history or to people who use questionable sources for their material.  Some of those writers even work for multiple publishers and plagiarize themselves.
• Move on to the design and layout of the books. Colorful banners and lavish illustrations are supposed to entertain media-saturated youth of today. Instead, they add to the page count and put in print that which could easily be found as an outside resource through the publishers’ websites. Loewen cites The Americans, published by McDougal Littel – at 1358 pages and seven pounds–as requiring a whole chapter telling students how to read the book.  Surely, that’s a failure of the designers.
• Content slanted towards what Loewen calls “hero-making,” which shows only the positive side of those deemed the good guys. North America didn’t exist until Columbus found it. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson didn’t own slaves.  Benevolent industrialists created jobs and opportunities that only benefited their grateful employees.
• Content that marginalizes or vilifies troublesome or inconvenient figures.  Helen Keller was the embodiment of American self-reliance, right up until she became a socialist “agitator”. John Brown was a madman who singlehandedly started the Civil War. Without significant pushback, people like Rosa Parks and Cesar Chavez may have suffered the same fate.
• A view that the onward and upward path of the United States is preordained–no involvement by the citizenry is necessary, because everything worked out in the past and it will continue to do so under the guidance of the wise men who will arise as needed.  The United States always acted with the best interests of the world in mind, and its actions never had consequences.
• A loaded adoption process which guarantees that all of the above come to pass. At $84 a copy (in 2007), The American Journey is simply too expensive to revise according to the individual standards of each state or community. So California and Texas, the largest customers in the textbook market,  get to decide what kids in the whole country study. Knowing that, a few conservative organizations raise a fuss over content and prevent adoption until everything they perceive as anti-American or anti-Christian has been removed.

I’ve written before about my genius phrase, “living forward into history.”  Without using that pithy term (though he’s welcome to in future editions), Loewen advocates showing students that people just like them made decisions with lasting consequences. By understanding the trauma of losing their homes, or publicly identifying themselves with unpopular stances, or being something other than white, male, and Christian, our youngest citizens could learn that they too will be faced with challenges they can’t ignore. Too bad the people entrusted with teaching them are saddled with such poor resources.

Check the WRL catalog for Lies My Teacher Told Me