UPDATE: After reading the first 150 pages, now I just sorta have this book on my shelf and pick it up from time to time.This book is very good on a few levels ... It takes the textbook publishers to task for their weak glossing over of American history, and it emphasizes the use of primary documents, which are important and often underutilized by lame teachers. It is also (verbosely) summarizes some very valid criticisms of the general treatment textbooks and by extension, some high school teachers on a handful of touchy subjects in American history.However, it is not what it purports to be, it is not new or unusual, and had it been titled appropriately, this book would have been relegated to the back of the store in the "teacher handbooks.""Lies My Teacher Told Me," comes across as revealing the "controversial issues" that these damn liars across America are foisting on our children. Please. Does ANYBODY teach that Christopher Columbus was a godlike hero? Do our high schools really teach that the inhabitants of North America when the Pilgrims landed were noble savages, few and far between, and that the Europeans were simply arriving to assume control of a continent that was virtually empty and ready for the taking ... And the Manifest Destiny march of conquest was merely inevitable and might makes right, and all that rot?These are the first three examples, taking up 110 of the 330 "Thanks-to-me-teachers-will-now-know-how-to-teach-U.S. History" pages. I don't disagree with most of what he says... That textbooks are too conservative, and that we need more current scholarship with some Howard Zinn and Ray Raphael mixed in... Yay.But Loewen is just so caught up in his quantifiable study of textbooks, he's operating under the ridiculously flawed assumption that all teachers do is hand out the big, fat textbook and go to sleep. And that's boring to kids! Well, yeah.The book has value and is interesting in many places, such as the 350th Anniversary of The First Thanksgiving in Massachusetts, when in 1970 the state department of commerce asked the Wampanoags to select a speaker. When Frank James was selected, and he had to show his speech to the white people, he was not allowed to read it, because it was not celebratory enough. That's fascinating, but that seems to fit in with one of Loewen's other books, "Lies Across America." It truly has nothing to do with "Lies my teacher told me," or even "Everything your American history textbook got wrong," which is the subtitle to this book.I'm still reading. I have set it aside because most of what he writes is self-congratulatory crap that suggests that he's informing the nation's mass of ignorant, fib-telling, morally bankrupt educators (who are probably being protected by that damn socialist teachers union). He's not. He's a retired former college sociology teacher who has ostensibly found a nice retirement income ("From the first day," he writes breathlessly in the introduction to the second edition, "the readers made 'Lies' a success.")Actually, I would submit that the biggest lie involved is that this guy is telling the country what goes on in history classroms. He's right that textbooks generally gloss over anything that doesn't present America as the "land of opportunity," and venerate the regular cast of heroes... But the textbooks are invariably bought by schoolboards, not the teachers. Maybe that's what he should have written this book about, but that would not have been nearly as sexy.Another thought: Why didn't this presumed wrong-righter choose to spend some time writing a really good, fair, accurate textbook? Oh, well, because tha would have been too hard, almost impossible (consider that he takes 330 pafes to touch upon 8-9 topics...). And besides, he'd have never made any money the way he has by jumping on the "teachers suck" bandwagon along with people who have a completely different and much more damaging agenda than his own.I suspect that the amazingly and purposefully inaccurate title was not part of his original idea ... This is primarily an indictment of textbooks, not teachers, but somebody must have told him how sales could skyrocket if he throws teachers under the bus in the title -- "even teachers will buy it out of self-defense!" That's why I bought it... I'm just glad I got it on sale.
In LMTTM, sociology professor James Loewen takes a close look at the subject of American history and why it is that high school students tend not just to loathe the subject but also come out of that class so badly informed. His verdict - the textbooks are to blame.In the 1992 version of this book, Loewen took a close look at the 12 most widely used history textbooks and discovered that their true purpose was less to educate American students about the entirety of their history but instead to accomplish the following: to present events in such a way as to prevent students from feeling bad about the less than sterling actions of our ancestors; to create polished heroic images of major historical figures untarnished by any hint of human complexity, to formulate the idea of perpetual progress, thus diminishing the students awareness of still existing societal inequities; to include every possible factoid that might make the book more appealing to people in various locations, and most importantly, to completely avoid offending any group that might have the power to prevent the textbook's adoption and thus diminish sales.The net result of this are tombs that are both mind-numbingly dull and exceedingly incomplete. Loewen does his best to correct the latter by highlighting in gruesome detail the horrors of our past left out of these books, from the brutal enslavement of the natives by Columbian explorers to the explosion of racist suppression of blacks after the Civil war to the nefarious actions of a government that is all too often acting at the behest of special interests rather than its wider citizenry.In addressing facts such as the ownership of slaves by the founding fathers and the overt racism of Woodrow Wilson, Loewen points out what students of literature have always known - complex, conflicted humans make for far more interesting subjects than one-dimensional superheros. Yet in neglecting to discuss the shadow sides of both our history and the people within it, our textbooks give the idea that history is a set of boring facts to be learned and perfect heroes to be emulated rather than a perpetually evolving compilation of interlocking and often conflicting ideas and the people who struggle with them. By denying students the ability to see history in this way, textbooks also deny them the ability to learn how to consider competing ideas, analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each, and in the process, discover how to think for themselves.At a time when so much of America seems to have lost touch with even the most basic facts of the present let alone the distant past, Loewen's book is incredibly important for anyone not just interested in our nation's past but also in its future. That said, however, this is not an easy book to read. In striving to provide balance to the mindless positive propaganda of our textbooks, Loewen dives so deep into the most horrible aspects of the American past I found this book often hard to stomach. It's not that I was unfamiliar with the basic atrocities he presents (though I did learn a great deal I hadn't known before), but the fact that he presents them in such a relentless litany, with only a passing reference to anything positive about America, left even a good liberal like me feeling starved to hear SOMETHING positive about my country. After reading this book, I can imagine how incredibly fascinating and stimulating a history book that included both the good and the bad sides of America would be and how far it would go in enabling the US citizenry to make better decisions about our future, but this is unfortunately not that book. I read the 2007 edition, which addressed changes that have been made in the 15 years since the original came out. Though some minor improvements have been made, the current dent in the problem is minor compared to the size of it, particularly at a time when right-wing fundamentalists on Texas textbook adoption boards are wielding such a huge influence on what will and won't get read by students in the rest of the country. Until the textbook Loewen envisions has been written, this will remain a crucial counterbalance to conventional American history.
What do You think about Lies My Teacher Told Me (1996)?
This biggest reason I'm rating this book so high is that it was so thought-provoking. Loewen reviewed 12 common American history textbooks and analyzed the content based on historical accuracy and bias. Unsurprisingly, they all presented a very sanitized and rosy view of American history. His argument is that most of the textbooks in use 1. are very Euro-centric, marginalizing minorities (especially african americans and native americans); 2. "heroify" major historical figures so much that they ignore any faults or human characteristics; 3. extinguish the possibility of critical thinking by avoiding controversy; 4. rely so much on memorization that students cram for tests and then purge their minds of the information to make room for the facts in the next chapter; 5. are factually inaccurate, because they regurgitate info from old textbooks without sourcing new historical research 6. Exclude primary sources... and there are probably some more important points that I'm forgetting. I agree with most of these conclusions, but to prove them, Loewen was a bit extreme in the opposite direction. To prove his point, the book ended up presenting a very sensationalized version of American history, because he was including only the worst examples of our past, to show what was excluded. By the end, I was exhausted. Ultimately, I finished the book realizing that I have a lot of gaps to fill in my knowledge of American history, especially in the recent past. Although I already realized that there it is impossible to write an unbiased history, it's made me more aware of how to study history more objectively and review my sources more critically. Wow. I didn't intend to write an essay. Sorry about that.
—Whitney Archibald
Uugh...well yea it's supposed to prove something. Looks like you made this comment before reading the "first 150 pages". Look's like someone judged a book by it's cover! Lol!
—Kristina
The thesis of the book is interesting and well supported, however, I found it pretty dry which was disappointing considering a main point Loewen makes is that Middle School/High School History books are too boring. He goes into too much depth in the first two chapters making the same point over and over again, while quickly and concisely exploring more current history, which again is the same criticism he makes of the textbooks he attacks. I also thing the extreme liberal tone of the book took away from the authors credibility and it would have been more successful without his unnecessary bashing conservatives. Despite my criticism I found the book very thought provoking and relevant. I would love to see Loewen included a comparison of how the same "history" is taught in different countries providing support with passages from different textbooks in France and Germany during WWII for instance.
—kendall
