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 | | Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by James W. Loewen ISBN-10: 9780743296281 ISBN-10: 0-7432-9628-1 ISBN-13: 9780743296281 ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-9628-1 Paperback 2007-10-16 Touchstone Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description Winner of the American Book Award and the Oliver C. Cox Americans have lost touch with their history, and in Lies My Teacher Told Me Professor James Loewen shows why. After surveying eighteen leading high school American history texts, he has concluded that not one does a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Marred by an embarrassing combination of blind patriotism, mindless optimism, sheer misinformation, and outright lies, these books omit almost all the ambiguity, passion, conflict, and drama from our past. In this revised edition, packed with updated material, Loewen explores how historical myths continue to be perpetuated in today's climate and adds an eye-opening chapter on the lies surrounding 9/11 and the Iraq War. From the truth about Columbus's historic voyages to an honest evaluation of our national leaders, Loewen revives our history, restoring the vitality and relevance it truly possesses. Thought provoking, nonpartisan, and often shocking, Loewen unveils the real America in this iconoclastic classic beloved by high school teachers, history buffs, and enlightened citizens across the country. | ||
Reviews | ||
Simple Facts and Evidence Shows Our Textbooks Need An Overhaul This book is filled with concrete examples of important details that are left out of history books because they will create controversy and might make students ask questions. Instead the goal of history has become to bore a student with unrelated and mostly useless facts - that any bored person will do his/her best to avoid. The human brain learns and remembers what is emotionally stimulating. If you tell history as a story with drama then it will tend to stick, "Emotion is the glue that causes history to stick". James W. Loewen "Study after study shows that students successfully resist learning "facts" like these. Indeed they resist all too well. When two thirds of American seventeen year olds cannot place the Civil War in the right half-century or 22 percent of my students reply that the `Vietnam War was fought between North and South Korea', we must salute young people for more than mere ignorance. This is resistance raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even those details of American history that educated citizens should know about. Still less do they learn what caused the major development in our past. Therefore, they cannot apply lessons from the past to current issues. Unfortunately, students are left with no resources to understand, accept, or reject historical referents used in arguments by candidates for offices, sociology professors, or newspaper journalists. If knowledge is power, ignorance cannot be bliss." IN textbooks the goal seems to be to present history NOT as a human drama of evolving understanding with progress and reversals (one step forward, 2 steps back) - but instead as an ever improving evolution to a better way of life. Page 172 "Perhaps the most letting critic Frances Fitz Gerald made in her 1979 survery of American history textbooks, America Revised, was that they leave out ideas." The problems with ideas is that sometimes it can be obvious which ideas are better yet the ones with the right ideas don't always win. It is easier to force memorization of useless facts than the show the students that the world doesn't work as continuous evolving society. The students would ask why. We all know how irritated some adults get when children keep asking why. Especially when they don't know the answer and it is below them to accept that. His basic message is that our history books are dooming us to repeat our mistakes of the past by forcing us (as a country) to make decisions based on infomercial, or angry racist talk show hosts as we have no background knowledge to make informed decisions. Lack of knowledge means a person can be controlled by using fear of the unknown. | ||
Any kid over the age of 12 will love it This eye-opening book puts multicultural historical interpretation into language that young kids will absolutely love. Although its themes and topics initially seem removed from the curriculum of junior high, Loewen's iconoclastic, glass-smashing approach to history will rivet young readers, most of whom have learned buckets of skepticism by the time they reach middle school. The book strikes a nerve with younger readers precisely because it's one of the first ones they'll pick up that confesses what they've long suspected: adults know that lots of what teachers are teaching is hokum. If this book title appeals to you, regardless of whether you agree with Loewen, chances are good that you were one of those kids and that even now you receive the official company line with great skepticism. You knew that your textbooks and your teachers were often chock full of horse hockey, but didn't have the ammunition to prove it. Rather than tearing down the accepted canons of U.S. history, however, this book does something that's much more destructive to approved history textbooks and ultimately much more illuminating. It makes an irrefutable case that what's presented as historical fact is often historical interpretation, that the interpretation depends on who's doing the telling, and that the lessons to be learned from the telling almost always depend on whether the teller ended up atop the winner's heap or under the winner's boot. The Germans like to say that the victor writes the history, but Loewen puts the lie to such apologists by proving that losers write history, too, they just have a lot harder time getting it printed in a school textbook. No question this is a great read, informative, and filled with the kind of attitude that made "A Series of Unfortunate Events" and "Captain Underpants" runaway winners for rebels of all ages. | ||
Just Say Know Our education system continues to Dumb Down. Knowing the past is key to not repeating mistakes and growing as a society. Someone should have sent this book to Bush/Cheney. It may not have helped but could not have hurt. | ||
Read it!!!!!! This book is so amazing and I recommend it for any person wanting to know some truths about our history. I am a Native American and to read some of Christopher Columbus' journals is appalling. There is an enormous amount of information in this book and as a teacher I think that it's an injustice to keep this to myself. | ||
Overrates the importance of textbooks Don't waste your time on this book. It has little new information, especially for history teachers. It is pretty much a standard revisionist rehash. It vastly overrates the importance of using textbooks in the classroom. Most modern history teachers are not married to the textbook anymore. The author assumes that teachers are stuck in an outmoded method of instruction where teachers just teach out of the textbook every day. It ignores innovative teachers that use primary source readings, simulations, films, debates, projects, class discussions, etc. When was the last time the author actually stuck his head in a classroom to see what is going on today? | ||