Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong [Paperback]

 

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong [Paperback]

 

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone (October 16, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743296281
• ISBN-13: 978-0743296281
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  

By : James W. Loewen
Price : $11.55
You Save : $5.44 (32%)

Customer Reviews

As a conservative white male who views revisionist history quite skeptically, I did not expect much from this book. As a student of American history, I understood what a woeful job our textbooks and (unfortunately) our teachers do in teaching the actual history of this country, but I never expected both the depth and the level of scholarship Mr. Loewen presents in this book. It is well researched, well written and much needed. Having grown up near an Indian reservation, my own personal studies in original sources confirm how accurate Mr. Loewen really is. The book is hardly "political correctness" run amuck as suggested by one review. And his point is not to paint America as evil or bash Christian Europeans as two other reviews would lead us to believe. This type of simple minded attack does not tell us anything about the book, but rather betrays the reviewers' own entrenched viewpoints - viewpoints that certainly will not be changed by exposure to the truth. In fact, the criticisms make Mr. Loewen's point almost better than he can as to why history is taught in feel-good myths rather than truth. Yes, Mr. Loewen treats certain issues and not others. He tells us he is doing so several times throughout the book, and makes apologies for it. This is not intended to be a replacement for a full history of the United States. Mr. Loewen makes good and valid suggestions as to such replacements. It is not even intended to be a complete coverage of all the things our history texts get wrong. He would need several more volumes for that, and even then would get some of it wrong. For those who actually read the book (and many reviewers obviously did not), he admits all of this. Mr. Loewen's book is an important start. But it is only a start. One reviewer, in criticising the book, stated that we must learn from our past. But this is exactly the point of the book. We must and can learn from our past, but only if we have the objectivity and moral courage to accept what that past was. As a white Christian Anglo-Saxon male, I feel no need to beat myself up as a result of the deeds done by white Christian Anglo-Saxon males who are long dead. But I do feel the need to move forward with as good an understanding as I can have of the cultural and personal histories that cause people to act as they do - especially those whose backgrounds are so different from my own.

In Lies My Teacher Told Me, sociologist James W. Loewen looks at twelve popular American history textbooks used in public high schools today and concludes that they are inexcusably inaccurate and biased. He shows that, in addition to their being sloppy and error-prone due to incompetence, textbooks oversimplify historical facts and causes, obscure the process by which historical interpretations are made and revised over time, perpetuate national myths and even willfully lie. Often, Loewen reveals, this is done in the service of promoting blind patriotism in students or in capitulation to various interest groups and other pressures that work to undermine the professionalism and integrity of the textbook industry itself. A multitude of examples from actual textbooks used today will likely disabuse many lay readers--including many high school teachers, according to cited studies of their expertise in their own field--of cherished but wrong beliefs.
Some readers will object to Loewen's obvious "liberal bias." There is a case to be made for this. I, for one, would like to see a deconstruction of textbooks' pervasive anti-capitalistic mentality. Is it honest history, for example, to mention the antitrust suit against Standard Oil but not to mention the fact that its business practices did not harm consumers but benefited them? Or that many of the reforms of the Progressive Era--the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act, to name but two--were lobbied for by "big business" (appropriate here, but what a loaded term!) to throttle their competitors? Or that there is more than one theory of the causes of the Great Depression--and that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal only prolonged it?
But, no matter. Such criticisms are beside the point. False and careless statements like "President Truman 'easily settled' the Korean War by dropping the atomic bomb"--a real example from a textbook--are simply not open to dispute on grounds of ideology. And while some of Loewen's other examples of textbook distortion (or his proposed remedies) are questionable, enough are valid that he makes his general case. All of us, liberals, conservatives or otherwise, should be able to agree that to teach a one-dimensional, "Disney version of history" (as Loewen calls it), in which complexities and controversies are smoothed over or ignored and students' understanding of causality in history is impaired, is plain wrong.
Loewen also tries--and not necessarily with an outsider's perspective, as he himself is a high school history textbook author, who knows firsthand the near futility of publishing a textbook of integrity--to explain the causes of our American history textbook troubles. In this connection, I must say that the Booklist editorial review that Amazon.com has posted to this webpage is misleading. The review states that "To account for the deplorable situation, he [Loewen] offers this quasi-Marxist explanation: 'Perhaps we are all dupes, manipulated by elite white male capitalists who orchestrate how history is written as part of their scheme to perpetuate their own power and privilege at the expense of the rest of us.'" But even Dr. Loewen is not that bad. Contrary to the review's implication, he ultimately dismisses this "elitist" explanation as an oversimplification, stating that "power elite theories may credit the upper class with more power, unity, and conscious self-interest than it has." He then discusses other explanations, such as the way textbooks are chosen--often by state-appointed adoption boards, which are sensitive to organized interest groups out to promote textbooks that further their own agendas, and which never have time to read 800+-page textbooks, in any case. Blame is also laid on textbook publishers, which have a financial incentive to copy success (i.e., traditional, mediocre textbooks) and to refrain from rocking the boat by being original and, thus, possibly arousing controversy; textbook authors, who for a variety of reasons have no incentive to do quality work; and teachers, many of whom aren't as expert in their subject as they should be or are afraid (not without good reason) of getting into trouble with parents and administrators should they teach against the book. Loewen's full account, which is fairly complex and discerning, of the various factors that interact to produce our high school American history textbooks, I leave for the reader to examine.
In closing, I would like to observe, in regard to the aforementioned ridiculous review by Booklist, that if one looks at Booklist's webpage, one sees that the publication itself is responsible for the review of textbooks that are used in public schools. Given this fact, the disrespectful, dismissive, even dishonest, treatment it accords Lies My Teacher Told Me should not surprise us. How ironic it is that Dr. Loewen's point has been made for him here, in this very forum, by his opponents.

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