Lies My Teacher Told Me - book review

How did you feel about your high school history class? Loved it? Hated it? Well, Lies My Teacher Told Me by Dr. James W. Loewen should make you hate your high school history class all over again. Loewen goes to great lengths in the first few chapters of the book to illustrate how high school text books get American history all wrong. The first colony in America was in Virginia not Massachusetts; Columbus was not the first person to find America; Columbus was not the nice visionary he's made out to be; early English settlers would have starved to death were it not for the assistance they got from the Indians; the English settlers deliberately used infected blankets to give Indians smallpox; and on and on and on. He points out that every president must have at least a paragraph about them even if they don't deserve it. Same goes for every state. Anything controversial is removed and no one is ever held to blame even though a disaster may clearly be man-made. Loewen gives example after example and quotes or footnotes the reference so you can look it up yourself. The result is a textbook that is, as most high school students know, BORING.

For some reason the same history, taught with the facts, in college suddenly becomes very interesting. So why does this happen? Some is due to school board censoring or editor or publisher acting defensively. Parents have been known to keep a subject out of a book and thus depriving an entire state or even region of the country of important information. In fact, there is so much information in this book about shoddy information presented as "history" that one begins to fear that all is lost, that the government controls the agenda, and the result is that our children will be taught total non-questioning loyalty to the administration in Washington.

But in the last two chapters we learn that there is hope after all. We can make a difference the same way other parents have lobbied for content removal. We can lobby for upgrades and a text that puts events into context and challenges the student to connect the dots - make history work like a science experiment to see if later events are absolutely predictable from earlier events.

For example, I could never understand the intense hatred the Soviets had for the USA right from the start of the cold war. Problem was, I wasn't looking back far enough. I was never exposed to the fact that Americans fought in the 1918 Russian Revolution on the side of the White Russians, thus prolonging the revolution and angering the eventual winners - the Soviets. History makes so much more sense when you have all the data.

With all the data that he gives you, you get the feeling that this book is a propaganda piece and there probably is a slant. But the answer is not to continue with deficient history texts but to pressure publishers to create more complete books even put in the controversies and disputed facts then let the students do research, review eventual outcomes, and choose for themselves which "facts" make the most sense.

An excellent, if somewhat emotionally wearing book.