Lies My Teacher Told Me

In caring for us, our parents not only bestow our livelihood but imprint upon us, whether consciously or unconsciously, their worldview, belief system, and biases. In this way, parents shape not only how we perceive reality, but also our personal identity. Eventually most children realize that their parents are not gods—they are ordinary, fallible people. And while this can be a traumatic realization, coming from the supple gossamer of childhood dependency, it is integral to adulthood.

On a much broader scale, governments produce a similar effect in their citizenry. For want of nationhood, local governments employ compulsory schooling as a means for creating a cohesive populace. A sense of national identity is imbued through the careful discipline of historiography outlined in American history textbooks used in schools across the country.

Loewen lays out some of the narratives underlying American history texts, and deconstructs them to illustrate how they contribute to unconscious biases that lead to racism, ethnocentrism, imperialism, and even genocide.

The analysis begins with the process of heroification—illustrating the ways in which history texts flatten our understanding of historical figures such as Helen Keller, Abraham Lincoln, John Brown, and Woodrow Wilson into decontextualized anecdotes. Taking Wilson as an example, the majority of history texts share his involvement in forming the League of Nations and support of women's suffrage, but leave out his racial segregation of the federal government and how under his command, US-involvement in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Somozas. Students also will not find this quote in their history texts, from Wilson's “An Address to the New York City High School Teachers Association,” made while President of Princeton University in 1909:

“We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class of necessity in every society, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.”

Loewen builds from the individual to the collective process of heroification, showing how it fortifies our sense of American exceptionalism:

“As part of the process of heroification, textbook authors treat America itself as a hero, indeed as the hero of their books, so they remove its warts. Even to report the facts of income and wealth distribution might seem critical of America the hero, for it is difficult to come up with a theory of social justice that can explain why 1 percent of the population controls almost 40 percent of the wealth. Could the other 99 percent of us be that lazy or otherwise undeserving? To go on to include some of the mechanisms—unequal schooling and the like—by which the upper class stays upper would clearly involve criticism of our beloved nation.”

“Textbook authors seem to believe that Americans can be loyal to their government only so long as they believe it has never done anything bad.” As we become aware of this educational movement we are left to infer that “criticism is incompatible with citizenship.”

After exposing the effects of selective history, Loewen then investigates the causes:

“In interviews with me, publishing executives blamed adoption boards, school administrators, or parents, whom they feel they have to please, for the distortions and lies of omission that mar U.S. history textbooks. Parents, whether black militants or Texas conservatives, blame publishers. Teachers blame administrators who make them use distasteful books or the publishers who produced them. But authors blame no one. They claim credit for their books. Several authors told me that they suffered no editorial interference. Indeed, authors of three different textbooks told me that their editors never offered a single content suggestion. ‘That book doesn't have fifty words in it that were changed by the editor!' exclaimed one author. ‘They were so respectful of my judgment, they were obsequious,' said another. ‘I kept waiting for them to say no, but they never did.'”

“The American Historical Review, Journal of American History, and Reviews in American History do not review high school textbooks. Thus, the authors' academic reputations are not really on the line.”

“There is no other country in the world where there is such a large gap between the sophisticated understanding of some professional historians and the basic education given by teachers.” —Marc Ferro, Historian

Quite disconcerting, yah?

Much like the traumatic realization of the mortality and fallibility of our parents, the same realization must be made in relation to our country, our government. If we are to pursue a democratic society, we have a civic duty to seek a critical understanding of our nation's sordid past and how it inevitably shapes the events of today. If any of this sounds worthwhile, then this book is a great start.

“In history, accuracy is political.”