Book Report: Lies My Teacher Told Me

I finally read Lies My Teacher Told Me, a book in a similar vain to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (which I have not yet read). The main difference between the two books, as far as I can tell, is that Lies is very focused on improving high school history education. The overall message is that hero-worship, feel-good stories about the past, and presenting history as facts instead of arguments do a tremendous disservice to our students.

To present this argument, the author, James Loewen, shows us many examples from American History of ways that high school history text books get history wrong for one of the reasons mentioned above. For example, we often present Woodrow Wilson as a hero without showing his flaws (very racist). In the interest of not showing our own flaws, we show Native Americans as barbarians and uncultured and often avoid talking about our genocide against them (in fact, Loewen spends much time on Native Americans). Frequent depictions of Reconstruction talk about northern interference and not the significant racism and violence.

The book is of course very liberal, and it presents a view of history that is meant to contradict what would appear to be conservative portraits of our history. I don't expect all people to take Loewen's word, but it at least provides a great place to start to investigate and debate different interpretations of our past.

While I was well aware of the way we ignore or misrepresent parts of our past (although I didn't know of all of these examples), what I had not thought about as much was the fact that there is much we do not know about history. For example, while we teach that Columbus was the first to discover America, rarely to teachers or text books talk about the possibility, and different sources of evidence, that others reached America before him. Presenting history as something that is regularly being investigated and debated is to me much more accurate and more interesting for students.

I will be interested to read A People's History and compare and contrast to this. I will also be using Lies as a reference and a starting point for many moments in our American History (first stop, War of 1812, which was different than it is commonly portrayed).