Review: Lies My Teacher Told Me

 Lies My Teacher Told Me is about the way history is taught in American classrooms. In many ways it's also about the ways history is not taught in those same classrooms. In particular, the textbooks used in history classes come in for particularly (and well deserved) sharp criticism:

In 2005, for example, the Pew Research Center found that 62 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “Poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.” Twenty-seven percent of Democrats also agreed. Such responses can only come from people who have neither had a conversation with a poor person nor imagined their economic and social reality—yet somehow imagine they know enough to hold an opinion. Educated people are more likely to venture such ill-informed opinions.24 Education does not have this impact in other areas of study. People who have taken more mathematics courses are more proficient at math than those who have not. (kindle loc 7496)

 The book starts with a provocative question: what was Helen Keller famous for, other than being blind and deaf but managed to teach herself how to read and write? I found myself unable to answer that question, and in fact, history books deliberately left out her achievements --- she was a socialist activist! Similarly, President Woodrow Wilson was an extremist socialist who re-introduced segregation to the White House, but that fact is never mentioned in the history books, where he was treated as a hero for attempting to start the league of nations.

The book then goes on to eviscerate various typical American founding myths, such as the idea the Christopher Columbus was uniquely smart to believe that the world was round --- that fact was in fact common knowledge. The book points out:

Columbus is not a hero in Mexico, even though Mexico is much more Spanish in culture than the United States and might be expected to take pride in this hero of Spanish history. Why not? Because Mexico is also much more Indian than the United States, and Mexicans perceive Columbus as white and European. “No sensible Indian person,” wrote George P. Horse Capture, “can celebrate the arrival of Columbus.”90 Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history. (kindle loc 1691)

This telling of history as the heroification of famous Americans, the author points out doesn't do justice to the heroes or to Americans. By not showing that Abraham Lincoln struggled with racism himself, there's also no appreciation that he did work hard (and ultimately sacrificed himself) to eliminate slavery. 

In 1863 Lincoln desegregated the White House staff, which initiated a desegregation of the federal government that lasted until Woodrow Wilson. Lincoln opened the White House to black callers, notably Frederick Douglass. He also continued to wrestle with his own racism, asking aides to investigate the feasibility of deporting (euphemistically termed colonizing) African Americans to Africa or Latin America...Saving the Union had never been Lincoln’s sole concern, as shown by his 1860 rejection of the eleventh-hour Crittenden Compromise, a constitutional amendment intended to preserve the Union by preserving slavery forever.32 Not one author explains the political context or the intended audience for the Greeley letter. Nor does a single textbook quote Lincoln’s encouragement that same summer to Unitarian ministers to “go home and try to bring the people to your views,” because “we shall need all the antislavery feeling in the country, and more.” If they did, students would understand that Lincoln’s response to the issue of slavery in America was hardly indifference. (kindle loc 4096-4121)

The book covers many more topics in great detail, including the nadir of anti-black racism, and how many history books written during that period could not make sense of the anti-slavery movement, and those templates carry over till today. As a result, we still have large numbers of educated Americans claiming that the civil war was about states rights, or that it was about economics, or continuing to spread the myth that black people actually enjoyed being enslaved and had a good life being slaves!

By pretending that the US had overcome racism and conveniently forgetting about the period between  Woodrow Wilson and the post-civil rights era, the author points out that it also glosses over what the country's greatest achievements were:

 Antiracism is one of America’s great gifts to the world. Its relevance extends far beyond race relations. Antiracism led to “a new birth of freedom” after the Civil War, and not only for African Americans. Twice, once in each century, the movement for black rights triggered the movement for women’s rights. Twice it reinvigorated our democratic spirit, which had been atrophying. Throughout the world, from South Africa to Northern Ireland, movements of oppressed people continue to use tactics and words borrowed from our abolitionist and civil rights movements. The clandestine early meetings of anticommunists in East Germany were marked by singing “We Shall Overcome.” Iranians used nonviolent methods borrowed from Thoreau and Martin Luther King Jr., to overthrow their hated shah. On Ho Chi Minh’s desk in Hanoi on the day he died lay a biography of John Brown. Among the heroes whose ideas inspired the students in Tiananmen Square and whose words spilled from their lips was Abraham Lincoln.81 Yet we in America, whose antiracist idealists are admired around the globe, seem to have lost these men and women as heroes. Our textbooks need to present them in such a way that we might again value our own idealism. (kindle loc 4457)

I learned lots and lots in this book, highlighting passage after passage. I smile every time Professor Loewen proudly proclaims that teenagers write to him about using this book to heckle their history teachers from the back of the class. I will say that I learned more about American history from this book than from an entire semester at Berkeley taking an American history class to fulfill a social studies requirement.

Highly recommended.