Originally published on September 21, 1995.
Among the books that have influenced my thinking are A Handmaid’s Tale and 1984. They both model the future and warn us to be vigilant about how our world could evolve. When I read about the bombings of abortion clinics or legislation to censor the Internet, I imagine how these developments fit with the models presented in these books.
Lies My Teacher Told Me also warns us to be vigilant. It’s an old premise that those in power control history, and James Loewen illustrates this by analyzing the politics of textbooks.
Beginning with the premise that students of high school history find the subject boring and irrelevant, the author explores how our history, which is actually full of conflict and controversy, has been made into a bland echo.
“The stories that history textbooks tell are predictable; every problem has already been solved or is about to be solved. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character. When they try for drama, they achieve only melodrama, because readers know that everything will turn out fine in the end.”
Loewen selected a dozen of the most widely read high school history texts in use. Among them are: The American Pageant, The American Way, Land of Promise, American History, The American Tradition, American Adventures, The American Adventure... well, you get the idea. The titles alone induce naptime.
As Loewen points out, “Chemistry books are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not ‘Rise of the Molecule.’”
Ignored by most textbooks, according to Loewen, is the significance of social and economic classes in the United States. Students are taught that there is less stratification and more economic and social mobility in the U.S. than in Europe. However, many measures of economic equality contradict this claim.
“In the United States, the richest fifth of the population earns eleven times as much income as the poorest fifth, one of the highest ratios in the industrialized world; in Great Britain the ratio is seven to one, in Japan, just four to one.”
Loewen argues convincingly that “social class is probably the single most important variable in society. From womb to tomb…”
The affluent have access to health care and better schools with teachers who put them on the college track. Affluent children get white collar jobs, their own attorneys, and become members of civic organizations. The rich exercise, the poor watch TV.
However, these realities of America’s class structure are ignored by the textbooks. Loewen cites the strikes of the Hormel meatpackers and the air traffic controllers in the 1980s as events that were ignored by all 12 of the textbooks he reviewed.
Textbook authors treat labor history as “something that happened long ago, like slavery, and that, like slavery, was corrected long ago. It logically follows that unions appear anachronistic.” The San Francisco newspaper workers’ strike certainly disproves that claim. Why do teachers treat social class as a “dirty little secret?” Perhaps it is to avoid embarrassing their students.
According to Loewen, “their concern is misguided. When my students from non-affluent backgrounds learn about the class system, they find the experience liberating. Once they see the social processes that have helped keep their families poor, they can let go of their negative self-image about being poor. Since history textbooks present the American past as 390 years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps.” Even affluent students learn not to blame poor people for their own state.
Loewen is at his best exposing the falsehoods found in textbooks. One falsehood is “heroification,” as Loewen calls it in a discussion of the life of Helen Keller. Many of us remember the film where Anne Sullivan pumps water into Keller’s hand while spelling out the word water. We know all about her early years as she overcame her disabilities. But how many of us know what became of her as an adult?
“The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist. After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of the new communist nation: ‘Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of Russia!’”
Keller’s left-wing beliefs may now appear as naive or treasonous, depending on your point of view. But why are they left out of high school education? Students might discuss in class what made her decide socialism was a solution to the problems of American society.
Keller’s research showed that “blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class” because of industrial accidents and poor access to health care.
Keller learned how the social class system controls people’s opportunities in life, sometimes determining even whether they can see.” Keller’s radicalism was not a secret in the 1920s. “At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet.”
Textbook authors deliberately omit most of her adult life, according to Loewen, thus turning her into an unambiguous “hero.” As far as the actual heroes of American students today, they don’t include Helen Keller, Christopher Columbus, or Miles Standish. More likely it’s Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, or Nelson Mandela.
“Students poke fun at the goody-goodiest of them all by passing on Helen Keller jokes. In so doing, schoolchildren are not poking cruel fun at a disabled person, they are deflating a pretentious symbol that is too good to be real.”
Watching Big Brother I remember once when my mother told me with a knowing look that my aunt in Iran lived on Patrice Lumumba Street, as if this were something slightly scandalous. I stared back at her blankly. “What’s a Patrice Lumumba?” I asked, never having heard of the Congolese leader who had been done in by the CIA.
I do find it scandalous that students (including myself) are not taught about the covert and illegal operations performed by our own government, including the assassination of this democratically elected leader of Zaire in 1961.
The repeated assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, the rigging of the 1957 elections in Lebanon (resulting in civil war), the restoration of Shah Pahlavi to Iran in 1953 are glossed over or ignored by many of the books Loewen reviewed.
“The U.S. government calls actions such as these ‘state-sponsored terrorism’ when other countries do them to us.” Instead, “textbook authors portray government actions as agreeable and nice.”
The federal government is given undue credit for many of the progressive reforms in our history. “It is particularly upsetting to watch this happen in the field of civil rights, where the courageous acts of thousands of citizens in the 1960s entreated and even forced the government to act.”
Loewen writes that history textbooks ignore the racism of the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover toward African Americans, including Martin Luther King, Jr., while crediting John F. Kennedy with advancing civil rights. He cites a passage in The Challenge of Freedom as a typical example.
“Following the President’s example, thousands of Americans became involved in the equal rights movement as well. In August 1963, more than 200,000 people took part in a march in Washington, D.C. This account reverses leader and led. In reality, Kennedy initially tried to stop the march and sent his vice-president to Norway to keep him away from it because he felt Lyndon Johnson was too pro-civil rights.”
My formal education in history stopped after high school and it is readers at my knowledge level who might benefit most from this book. For those who studied history in college, however, this book may be old news, or it may cause them to redouble their efforts to improve history education.
I found Lies My Teacher Told Me fascinating and hard to put down. And when you finish the text, I recommend that you continue with the endnotes. Many of them contain additional tidbits meriting another trip to the library.
