Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen. New York: Touchstone, 1995 (Link is to 2018 edition with a different publisher).
Summary: Based on an examination of twelve American history high school textbooks, looks at how these oversimplify, omit, distort, and sometimes perpetuate false myths of American history, and make the teaching of history boring in the process.
The late James Loewen wrote this book after surveying twelve history textbooks used to teach high school students in the early 1990’s. He found that most of these often passed along lies or distortions of the material they covered. Often this was the result of omitting important discussions. Loewen opens this study considering what most history books don’t tell us about Woodrow Wilson. They don’t tell us that he launched a war with Communist Russia at the end of the First World War. Wilson also launched invasions of several Latin America, and after an era of progress, instituted racist policies in government that may have contributed to the resurgence of the Klan in the 1920’s. Likewise with Helen Keller. We hear about how she overcomes blindness and deafness but most say little about the other six decades of her life, probably because of her socialist activism.
Loewen goes on to discuss a number of examples throughout American history and what the twelve textbooks do with them: Christopher Columbus and what his “discovery” meant to indigenous peoples who were “discovered,” the realities of the first Thanksgiving, how we narrate the history of Native Americans, how we whitewash racism from textbooks, even in accounts of the Civil War and in our treatments of both John Brown and Abraham Lincoln. He goes on to discuss federal power and how our government sought to bring down regime after regime, rarely discussed in our history books and how many texts are nearly silent about Vietnam, with the results that students think it was a war between North and South Korea!
Why does this happen? Loewen, who had worked with editorial committees of textbook publishers, discusses the aversion these publishers have to controversy. Controversy can mean losses of millions of dollars. Patriotism sells. America’s failures to live up to its stated ideals do not. They realize how consequential state and local boards are to the adoption of textbooks. He believes a large part of the fault lies here. He is more forgiving of teachers, recognizing both that they may not always have the knowledge or the time to gain the knowledge to challenge the textbooks–and they have huge demands on their lives.
The tragedy of all this in Loewen’s mind is that in making history uncontroversial we have made it dull. Accurate history, in all its complicatedness, is far more interesting. When students explore a president like Wilson at both his best and worst, they stop worshipping heroes and see historical figures as real and fallible human beings. History that is honest about both our failings and how people stood up to resist corruption and power because of their belief in America’s ideals doesn’t teach students to hate the country, it teaches them to care.
Loewen was writing this in 1995 and what reading him helped me realize is that what is going on in many of our state legislatures and parents groups around what is taught as our history is not a new discussion, simply a reinvigorated one. For a long time, we have been a nation that wants to feel good about ourselves without doing the hard work of facing what has been and is not good about us and learning from those who have brought progress toward our American ideals. For a long time, powerful interests have sought to hide what they are doing to the rest of the country behind facades of American greatness. How can it be that the wealth disparities between the top 1 percent and the rest of the country are just because the rest of us are benighted losers?
What is saddest is that we don’t turn students into patriots, we turn them into cynics, because they are good at detecting falsehoods. The tragedy is that we also teach them that truth cannot be found in our history, or really in anything else. And when there is no basis for liberty and justice in truth, then all that we have left is power.
I was one educated in the way Loewen describes. Thankfully, several college professors opened my eyes to what it really means to do history without the lies, to look at our complicated human condition, and to keep asking questions, and to care about the answers. They taught me to love history. They also helped teach me that for love of country to really mean something, it has to be able to look at ourselves at our best and worst and to keep showing up as citizens, pursuing the common good.
Loewen holds out to us the hope that we can do so much better, not by sanitized versions of our history but through texts and teachers that teach both the good and the bad, that will not only capture our children’s interest, but help them become passionate about making our country at least a little better in their generation. It seems to me that this is something all true patriots ought support.
