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1.03k reviews for:
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
James W. Loewen
4.04 AVERAGE
1.03k reviews for:
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
James W. Loewen
4.04 AVERAGE
informative
medium-paced
challenging
informative
slow-paced
challenging
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
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challenging
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Thought provoking, educational.
informative
reflective
medium-paced
It's not really news to me that textbooks on American history tell a generally sunnier tale than what actually happened; after all, I read Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States a few years ago, and I've known Columbus was a jerk for a long time now. But where Zinn's book (at least in my memory) approaches history from the angle of people's movements because he feels they've been criminally neglected, Loewen focuses on the idea that the Disney-version history we teach high school students actually makes them stupider and less capable of making sound political decisions in the future.
One of his points that particularly resonated with me was his observation that high school American history courses basically ignore the most recent few decades of history, and that these are the decades high school students need to learn about the most, as they have the most bearing on things happening in the present. The first election I paid any attention to was the presidential election in 2000 (my main takeaways: lockbox, fuzzy math). I had to figure out how to vote in 2004 having not learned a single thing in school about anything that happened on the planet from about 1970 onward, including the first Bush presidency, the Persian Gulf War, and basically anything that happened in the Middle East since Mesopotamia. (Wait, that's not totally fair--shoutout to my speech teacher, who had my friends and I formally debate the Iraq War. Maybe I should say: I didn't learn anything about those things in school that I didn't look up myself on the internet.) This is a big failure of an institution that ostensibly exists at least in part to create an informed citizenry and not, as Loewen suggests at one point, a passive, ignorant citizenry with enough patriotism and optimism to support its government's decisions without question. (I know a lot of teachers and I don't think this is anyone's goal.) It's distressing on a personal level because I have existed for half of that time period and I don't even totally understand what happened in it.
Since this book was published, though, internet resources have exploded and the technology to access them has worked its way into many classrooms (and pockets). I'm hopeful that these resources will make it ever easier to bring more of the recent past into the classroom. Even if it doesn't fully correct the issues Loewen worries about, it at least makes it easier for students to close these gaps on their own by doing their own research.
UPDATE: I substituted in a social studies classroom today and conducted my own quick survey of the American History textbook in use. It was published in 2005, and was current up to about 2003. I wish I had had time to read more of it to get a closer look, but it at least included all of the stuff that Loewen lamented was missing from texts he surveyed (although that might just be because this one was published ten years after his own book and twenty years after many of the books he was surveying). The tone seemed pretty neutral to me, and each chapter began with a section that provided context/tried to connect whatever the chapter was about with the history that came before it, which was one of Loewen's critiques of the textbooks he looked at (that they didn't give students a big-picture view of things that would allow them to see connections between events/cause and effect relationships). You would still need to supplement the text with some more recent info. The sections about Afghanistan and Iraq are way too optimistic, for example (decidedly 2003-flavored), and you would want to cover the Great Recession, Obama's election, and the Tea Party and Occupy movements, probably. (Which, based on the teacher's final exam review packet/stuff posted around the room, she did.) I think there's also a push to include more primary materials in the study of history, which is great, and which Loewen feared would fade out with the unpopularity of the "inquiry" textbooks he reviewed. I feel a little reassured, I guess, on the textbook front, but mostly by the actual human history teachers I know, who work hard to make history interesting and relevant, book or no book, and teach students the value of inquiry and critical thinking.
One of his points that particularly resonated with me was his observation that high school American history courses basically ignore the most recent few decades of history, and that these are the decades high school students need to learn about the most, as they have the most bearing on things happening in the present. The first election I paid any attention to was the presidential election in 2000 (my main takeaways: lockbox, fuzzy math). I had to figure out how to vote in 2004 having not learned a single thing in school about anything that happened on the planet from about 1970 onward, including the first Bush presidency, the Persian Gulf War, and basically anything that happened in the Middle East since Mesopotamia. (Wait, that's not totally fair--shoutout to my speech teacher, who had my friends and I formally debate the Iraq War. Maybe I should say: I didn't learn anything about those things in school that I didn't look up myself on the internet.) This is a big failure of an institution that ostensibly exists at least in part to create an informed citizenry and not, as Loewen suggests at one point, a passive, ignorant citizenry with enough patriotism and optimism to support its government's decisions without question. (I know a lot of teachers and I don't think this is anyone's goal.) It's distressing on a personal level because I have existed for half of that time period and I don't even totally understand what happened in it.
Since this book was published, though, internet resources have exploded and the technology to access them has worked its way into many classrooms (and pockets). I'm hopeful that these resources will make it ever easier to bring more of the recent past into the classroom. Even if it doesn't fully correct the issues Loewen worries about, it at least makes it easier for students to close these gaps on their own by doing their own research.
UPDATE: I substituted in a social studies classroom today and conducted my own quick survey of the American History textbook in use. It was published in 2005, and was current up to about 2003. I wish I had had time to read more of it to get a closer look, but it at least included all of the stuff that Loewen lamented was missing from texts he surveyed (although that might just be because this one was published ten years after his own book and twenty years after many of the books he was surveying). The tone seemed pretty neutral to me, and each chapter began with a section that provided context/tried to connect whatever the chapter was about with the history that came before it, which was one of Loewen's critiques of the textbooks he looked at (that they didn't give students a big-picture view of things that would allow them to see connections between events/cause and effect relationships). You would still need to supplement the text with some more recent info. The sections about Afghanistan and Iraq are way too optimistic, for example (decidedly 2003-flavored), and you would want to cover the Great Recession, Obama's election, and the Tea Party and Occupy movements, probably. (Which, based on the teacher's final exam review packet/stuff posted around the room, she did.) I think there's also a push to include more primary materials in the study of history, which is great, and which Loewen feared would fade out with the unpopularity of the "inquiry" textbooks he reviewed. I feel a little reassured, I guess, on the textbook front, but mostly by the actual human history teachers I know, who work hard to make history interesting and relevant, book or no book, and teach students the value of inquiry and critical thinking.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Fascinating and informative. Unfortunately is slightly outdated at the end but not by much.
challenging
dark
informative
inspiring
medium-paced