“Lies My Teacher Told Me” - James W. Loewen

 🎒I would encourage all products of the American education system (like me) as well as parents of school-age children, to read this book. Loewen discusses this himself in his preface, but don’t be alarmed by the title of this book. It is in no way an attack on American school teachers. It is an attack on the educational system that encourages the rote memorization of names and dates without the all-powerful tools of context and critical thinking.

🎒 I was blessed to attend public school in an excellent, and reasonably funded school district. I had the good fortune of some engaging history teachers, and I eagerly took every AP history class I could (World History, European, American, Government) over four years of high school. Even so, I was nodding in agreement with everything Loewen writes about the purpose of this book: there has been a serious lack in developing true critical thinking in American school kids. This massive shortcoming is being felt even more acutely in the age of “alternative facts” and is compounded by a shortfall in developing critical thinking with respect to technology and sources of “information”.

🎒 All these years later, I find (to my chagrin but not surprise) that many of the same problematic treatments of American history continue to color my children’s textbooks today. I had my hackles raised the minute my oldest showed me an entire section in his textbook detailing the “discovery of America”. I had to take a breath and reframe this for him. Columbus no more discovered this continent than I discovered iced coffee the first time I tasted it. It may seem minor, but starting off with this approach subconsciously trains students to view American history through a Eurocentric lens; it lays the vicious trap of thinking of European conquest and exploits as positive, and indigenous cultures as negative. This continent was populated by rich and diverse cultures long before. It existed before Columbus.

🎒 Ashwin is working his way through the edition written for younger readers. Loewen has presented him and me with no shortage of topics to discuss. It’s a wonderful conversation that fosters critical thinking in both of us! Recently, we were at the JFK Presidential museum in Boston, and the subject of Woodrow Wilson came up. Without missing a beat, Ashwin remarked with a huff “that racist, anti-feminist?”. I couldn’t help but smile. Loewen specifically addresses the sanitized portrayal of Wilson in our textbooks. This is not to suggest that JWL is encouraging youth to be inflammatory dilettantes; on the contrary, he teaching us all to think critically of how history is presented to us.

🎒 JWL agrees that American teachers are tasked with a significant goal: to educate American youth, but are rarely given the necessary resources to do so well. Loewen takes a hard look at the educational system that has overburdened and underpaid professionals who are often discouraged from creative methodology at every turn by school boards, administrators, and parents. 

JWL writes: “surely the end product of high school U.S. history courses is graduates who can think clearly, distinguish evidence from opinion, and separate truth from from what comedian Stephen Colbert called ‘truthiness’.” 

JWL goes on to say that “when students are not asked to assess, but only to remember, they do not learn how to assess or how to think for themselves.”

🎒 To the end of promoting critical thinking in students, JWL takes time to specifically excoriate the so-called “critical thinking” text bubbles that crop up in so many of the available textbooks as being completely uncritical and unthinking. Under the guise of critical thinking, students are asked to regurgitate useless factoids that invite factless speculation. Students have to be taught that not all facts carry equal weight, but if no one has research to support their opinions, then the classroom is not engaging in critical thinking, and will insist on equity even if it is a false equity.

Regarding the importance of critical thinking for today’s students, JWL writes: “without critical thinking, students have a vast echo chamber of opinions at their fingertips. Online sources often only further the opinion of its authors. Nothing more or less. No alternative viewpoints. And the lack of challenging positions creates an impression of truth or validity.”.

🎒 JWL has provided a useful list of ten questions that we should all be asking ourselves when evaluating historical sources; again, not all facts carry equal weight and it is crucial to be aware that “[W]riters’ ideologies and locations in social structure usually influence what they write”. I’ve slightly adapted his questions below:

(1) When and were did the author live?

(2) For what purpose did they write? What audience did they have in mind?

(3) What was the author’s social class?

(4) What was their race? sex? age?

(5) What were their basic assumptions about Black people? about white people? about Indians or others?

(6) What was their ideology?

(7) Do they cite facts to support their conclusions?

(8) Does what they say about a subject seem to be true from your own experience?

(9) How do their conclusions compare with those of other authors you have read? Are they biased?

(10) Is what they are talking about relevant to your life and to present-day society?

🎒There are slew of terms that JWL argues should be clearly defined in textbooks. It was sort of a *slaps forehead* moment, but of course these words should appear in print so that students can begin to understand history in the proper context. There’s a reason many students feel that racism ended with slavery!

• syncretism
• interculturation
• triracial isolates
• cultural imperialism
• intellectual interchange
• social structure and superstructure (i.e. slavery as a socioeconomic system and racism as an idea system; the idea system of racism outlived the social structure of slavery). 
• racism (yes. It begs a clear definition of what it is and who perpetrates it. How else can we make clear that “reverse racism” is not a real thing?!)
• the sociological definition of segregation
• tangle of pathology (in African-American society)
• social stratification, class structure, income distribution, and inequality (the notion remains that America and American education are meritocracies).

🎒  The myth busting angle to LMTTM was great fun. Trust me that there were so many that I lost track, but here are some that stood out:

• Columbus (obviously)
• Renaissance as an exclusively European achievement (p. 33)
• Plymouth (American founding myth)
• Major battles of the War of 1812 were against Native American tribes
• Maps depicting Louisiana Purchase totally eliminate the Native American presence
• Roanoke was unlikely to have been a “lost colony” but the idea of white absorption into Native American culture was unthinkable
• The sheer volume of Native American wars; there are too many to discuss them all in great detail, but to omit them entirely minimizes white aggression and Native American history (how much Native American students feel reading this inaccurate version of events?)
• Treatment of Native religions as a “unitary whole” (p. 113)
• “Alternatives forgone” in regards to white-Native American relations; I’d never paused to consider that there were other avenues available, and that the the outcomes of massacre and genocide were hardly inevitable.
• The age of European exploration was truly an arms race which continues today
• In the Civil Rights era, the government is depicted favorably as something approaching progressive (JFK, LBJ); but the reality of African-Americans and white allies fighting for their agency as the true catalyst for change, is omitted. Students are presented with a beneficent federal government that agreed on its own to make changes (if students want change today, they have zero framework for how it was achieved in the past).
• Coverage of the Vietnam War silences the anti-war movement. Students must see the death and destruction to comprehend this war for what it was: a mistake. Without this, we have a scenario where John Kerry’s testimony urging withdrawal was used as a point of weakness during his presidential campaign.

🎒 Bias floods American history books, often in the form of stubborn archetypes that continue to manifest themselves in lesson plans today. For example, the power of the social archetype (the hero can only be all good) is evidenced by “the notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has ‘the power to rise in the world,’ is anathema to textbook authors, and to many teachers as well.”

• Hero/good guy
• Non-syncretic Renaissance
• Threatening Islam
• Modern technology as an exclusively European development
• Those “who direct social enterprises are smarter than those nearer the bottom” (captain versus sailors)
• America as a virgin continent
• Primitive tribes versus civilized Europeans
• American exceptionalism; God is on our side; ethnocentrism
• Pilgrim mythology
• Frontier lines with Native Americans on one side, and whites (and Blacks) moving west; the area beyond European control as a wilderness or frontier. 
• The Laura Ingalls Wilder archetype of peaceful white settlers - hardy and suffering occasional attacks by heathen Indians
• The savage or primitive Native Americans as having a “premodern understanding of land ownership” and therefore being a roaming, hunting people.

🎒 The first 11 chapters of LMTTM focus on analysis of flaws in content; JWL looks at omissions and misrepresentations and the impact on students. The final chapters focus on how we got here - politics, school boards, funding, etc. JWL asks the fundamental question of why American history continues to be taught this way and moves beyond a critique of content and style (readability, interest) to the actual process of textbook adoption. The latter chapters aren’t nearly as exciting as the preceding ones, but they shed light on the status quo.

🎒 This was a thought-provoking book that I highly recommend. This book forces a reckoning with everything we’ve ever been taught; JWL doesn’t limit his ire to history textbooks, it’s directed as well to documentaries, museums, and novels that coalesce to produce extremely skewed and error-filled perception of historical figures and events. JWL recommends Frances Fitzgerald’s “America Revised” for further reading.