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hillsider 's review for:
Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
by James W. Loewen
When I was in school, I could memorize lots of scattered facts. I still can, and I owe my love for trivia shows to this ability. I was also a pretty lazy child, though teachers who teach gifted students would say I was bored with the ease of material. I never found that much compelling about any subject really, so my favorite class defaulted to history due to its outsized reliance on memorization. I probably retained a lot more than the average student. I can name many of the events in American history and tell you at least an approximation of when they happened. I couldn't understand other people's trouble with this easy subject. Devour some terms, some dates, and maybe a few names and you were golden.
I don't say it to brag. Memorization of this type is a glorified parlor trick. I could have tell you when John F. Kennedy or Jimmy Carter was elected, but not [i]why[/i] they were elected. It's perfectly pointless knowledge; trivia, if you will. Ostensibly the reason we learn history is to learn from our past. It's a perfectly fine cliche, and it's what we should aspire to. But I realized when I began reading outside of the classroom that this just wasn't true. Or at least it didn't make it to the people writing textbooks and designing curricula. In [i]Lies My Teacher Told Me[/i], Loewen lays out a multi-faceted case on how our American history classes came to be so trivial and non-engaging for students.
Still today, I find things in this book (and others) jaw-dropping, even things I already knew. How could so much of this been left out of our classes? How could I have gone so long knowing dates and figures but not have any understanding of the meaning they actually have? The author argues that textbooks, due to quirks in the process of adopting, the class stature of those who are making the decisions, and lack of actual historian's input all contribute to the proliferation of high school American history texts that seem to be more concerned with creating good (a.k.a. docile) citizens than actually reckoning with and learning from our history.
If I become a history teacher, I could pretty confidently credit Loewen with a share of that decision. Reading this book some years ago and re-reading it in the past month has made me want to passionately pursue teaching students the real history, and in so doing teaching a history that is actually interesting.
I don't say it to brag. Memorization of this type is a glorified parlor trick. I could have tell you when John F. Kennedy or Jimmy Carter was elected, but not [i]why[/i] they were elected. It's perfectly pointless knowledge; trivia, if you will. Ostensibly the reason we learn history is to learn from our past. It's a perfectly fine cliche, and it's what we should aspire to. But I realized when I began reading outside of the classroom that this just wasn't true. Or at least it didn't make it to the people writing textbooks and designing curricula. In [i]Lies My Teacher Told Me[/i], Loewen lays out a multi-faceted case on how our American history classes came to be so trivial and non-engaging for students.
Still today, I find things in this book (and others) jaw-dropping, even things I already knew. How could so much of this been left out of our classes? How could I have gone so long knowing dates and figures but not have any understanding of the meaning they actually have? The author argues that textbooks, due to quirks in the process of adopting, the class stature of those who are making the decisions, and lack of actual historian's input all contribute to the proliferation of high school American history texts that seem to be more concerned with creating good (a.k.a. docile) citizens than actually reckoning with and learning from our history.
If I become a history teacher, I could pretty confidently credit Loewen with a share of that decision. Reading this book some years ago and re-reading it in the past month has made me want to passionately pursue teaching students the real history, and in so doing teaching a history that is actually interesting.