Review of 'Lies my teacher told me' on 'Goodreads'
5 stars
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen is worth your time. I found shocking revelations in each chapter that I was able to verify with Loewen’s footnotes and cursory fact-checking. In the book, Loewen reviews 12 American History textbooks and compares them with the primary and secondary sources they are based on. Loewen’s findings scare me:
- Through a variety of forces, history and historical actors are heroified: positive qualities and events are emphasized and negative ones are ignored.
- Ideas are absent. This allows the writer to present history as a parade of dates, battles, and laws that were inevitable and the result of government policy, not individuals and movements.
- All 12 American History textbooks center the history of male, affluent, European individuals, flattening true historical events and ignoring the contributions of individuals and movements of other genders, races, ethnicities, and sexualities that contributed to the …
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen is worth your time. I found shocking revelations in each chapter that I was able to verify with Loewen’s footnotes and cursory fact-checking. In the book, Loewen reviews 12 American History textbooks and compares them with the primary and secondary sources they are based on. Loewen’s findings scare me:
- Through a variety of forces, history and historical actors are heroified: positive qualities and events are emphasized and negative ones are ignored.
- Ideas are absent. This allows the writer to present history as a parade of dates, battles, and laws that were inevitable and the result of government policy, not individuals and movements.
- All 12 American History textbooks center the history of male, affluent, European individuals, flattening true historical events and ignoring the contributions of individuals and movements of other genders, races, ethnicities, and sexualities that contributed to the current moment. The bias of textbooks leads students away from the interesting complexities of the past and towards a bland, false substitute.
- Textbooks are designed to sell copies and be accepted by schools, not to convey the past objectively. History textbooks are a mirror of the history that is most palatable to the greatest number of people.
History textbooks defend the actions of the American government against criticism. Citizens and history teachers must learn to think critically and use primary and secondary sources to understand the past and make choices about the future. High school history textbooks and some high school history classes will not do this for us.
