James W. Loewen
“Lies My Teacher Told Me” aims at discrediting numerous US History textbooks and show what High School students aren’t getting the right information on. Like any book, it’s divided into chapters and the topics in each chapter are based on one somewhat general topic. It does sound perfectly standard, but each chapter never really got it entirely straight, as it doesn’t know when to be be specific or back off on the specifics. Example, the first chapter; which was fairly entertaining, focused on how textbooks tend to make heroes out of people that weren’t entirely who they say they were. When the book works, there can be some interesting moments.
Pg 20 “The truth is that Hellen Keller was a radical socialist. She Joined the Socialist Party of Massachusetts in 1909... After the Russian Revolution she sang the praises of the new communist nation.”
Pg 23 “Among the progressive-era reforms with which students often credit Woodrow Wilson is women’s suffrage. Although women did receive the right to vote during Wilson’s administration. the president was at first unsympathetic. He had suffragists arrested; his wife detested them. Public pressure aroused by hunger strikes and other actions of the movement, convinced Wilson to oppose women’s suffrage was politically unwise. Textbooks typically fail to show the interrelationship between hero and the people. By giving credit to the hero, authors tell less than half of the story.”
Who would have thought that a blind and deaf women not only learned how to talk, but became a prominent communist supporter, only to be demonized for it later, and an otherwise respected US president wasn’t as great a guy we think he was and in fact not only anti progressive, but a white supremacist. Thats all well and good, but the problem arises when after talking about who Hellen Keller really was, it distracts it’s self by rambling about the cold war then every other minute detail about Wilson. It annoyed me and would’ve liked to see more examples, maybe the fact that Abraham Lincoln is credited for freeing the slaves, but actually believed that how they were used had political benefits.
And thats the problem with the book, it doesn’t know when to stop and say something else. Buy not getting to the point of why this is such a tragedy, I found it to wear thin and become very uninteresting, which is too bad because the information can be interesting and thought provoking. To further this issue, because there are only thirteen chapters that are somewhat on topic, the arguable lack of subjects sort of takes away from the enormity of what the author is trying to prove. Furthermore, if this book is “lies my teacher told me”, and focuses on information in textbooks strictly, it would’ve lived up to it’s name if it went after any ridiculousness of the school system as a whole.
On a positive note, the writing is overall solid. When I did try to take the book for what it is, it’s great how the amount of evidence rapidly discredits the opposite side. I enjoy debating in my history class, and I can tell this guy has some experience behind him. Here is a passage from the beginning of "Red Eyes"
"There is not one Indian in the whole of this country who would not cringe in anguish and frustration because of these textbooks. There is not one Indian child who has not come home in shame and tears.
- Rupert Castro
Historically, American Indians have been the most lied about subset of our population. That's why Michael Dorris said that in learning about Native Americans "One does not start from point zero, but from minus ten." High school students start from below zero because of their textbooks, which unapologetically present Native Americans through white eyes. Today textbooks should do better especially since what historians call Indian history (though really it is interracial) has flowered in the last twenty years, and the information on which new textbooks might be based currently rests on library shelves."
You can take near any passage from the book and you’ll see a constant stream of evidence that you really only need to read the first few paragraphs, then you get the idea of how the textbooks got it wrong. But still, thats what the book is, just a lot of evidence, that in the end also contradicts it’s self on a certain level. The author often tries to tell you what the books don’t tell you rather than how they lie to you. You can’t a High School level textbook to tell you every last detail about how a president is a racist, you should just be expected to know Woodrow Wilson legislated woman’s suffrage, whether it be willingly or unwillingly, and not if he was a racist or not.
“Lies My Teacher Told Me” has a lot going for it, but it gets ahead of it’s self way to often, and the specifics it gets into often tend to crumble over it’s own weight.
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