In our age of fake news, populist leaders like President Trump have been known to make false statements on a wide range of issues, from history to policy. Especially dangerous are distortions or revisionist interpretations of the former (like declaring human trafficking to be the worst problem in the history of the world, ignoring the obvious injustices of slavery and the barbarity of Columbus towards indigenous peoples), which can dangerously narrow one's worldview and the available solutions to the present world's problems. Trump is not alone in misunderstanding or omitting key parts of American history. Many Americans (myself included) struggle to recall various historical factoids from our high school civics/history courses and what we do recall might be wrong (or the fact that the history textbooks used were back-breaking behemoths!). What has gone wrong with the teaching of American history? Author, historian and sociologist James Loewen sets out to answer this question in the newest (2007) edition of his popular book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.
Originally published in 1995, Lies My Teacher Told Me is out with a second edition, to cover more ground with recent events like 9/11 and the ensuing War on Terror. Most of the book is dedicated at the outset to dispelling myths around events like Columbus's landing in "America" to the post Civil War period of Reconstruction to 9/11 and the role of government in domestic/international affairs as they are portrayed in the major high-school level textbooks (Loewen surveys 18 textbooks for his latest edition). The last few chapters are devoted especially to textbook critique and suggests ways that teachers could improve student engagement in American history courses.
Because Loewen covers a great deal of historical ground, I will focus on the main issues Loewen raises with textbooks. First and foremost is how history is often shaped by the victors (i.e. the dominant culture) to both paint them and their ancestors in a more flattering light and whitewash (some pun intended here) much of the bad done (i.e. African and American Indian slavery, the Spanish conquistadors' brutal exploitation of indigenous peoples in the name of greed). In other words, history is often self-serving to dominant groups and this is reflected in textbooks by the near-deification of figures like Christopher Columbus and Helen Keller, turning them from imperfect human beings into bland and "pious, perfect creatures without conflicts, pain, credibility, or human interest" (Loewen, 2018, p. 31). Historical figures become archetypes, often used for the purposes of instilling blind patriotism by identifying in them our values: tolerance, forward-thinking, hard-working, industrious, etc. (Perhaps this identification is more the result of the projection of our societal values, specifically Western ones, onto historical figures, rather than the other way around.)
One of the more prominent examples to me was that of Columbus, whose atrocities towards native populations (something I hadn't discovered until my college courses in American government/history and multicultural studies) cannot be overstated (for example, enslavement of indigenous peoples), is more well known for apparently being a progressive, forward-thinking explorer carrying the hopes of Europe with him to the New World. Then there is Woodrow Wilson, who, despite his famous championing of women's suffrage and the League of Nations, was notoriously racist, segregating the federal government while he was in office.
The second issue is that the textbooks teachers teach from (often because it is easier than devoting more time they don't have outside of their many other duties to radically restructuring the curriculum and lesson plans) encourage the teaching of history in a way that does not invite controversies. Rather, history is presented as a black-and-white string of loosely-connected events, with each event a problem that is neatly resolved with some sort of action, usually on behalf of centralized authorities (like racism being solved by the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act). And with each successive correction of injustice, we get ever closer to perfection as a society (i.e. the ideal of progress as inevitable). This means that it is very difficult to persuade anyone that history has relevance to their daily lives if the past itself was a mess of seemingly unrelated events. Moreover, it prevents students and citizens from seeing how issues like racism and inequality persist in various (yet often different or more subtle) forms today. And it leads to a dangerous trap of apathy: if nothing can be done to understand today's issues in historical context, why bother trying to change anything?
Finally, there's the issue that textbooks aren't written by historians and often stray far from primary sources (letters, photographs, videos, etc.). That really surprised me. Shouldn't the knowledge being imparted to students (students we want to be better, engaged citizens) require the strictest vetting and fact-checking (especially by people trained in that specific subject area)? No wonder there are so many false narratives and misconceptions out there.
What solutions are there, if any, to this complex problem of history teaching? Loewen suggests that to ameliorate the pressures coming from parents, publishing companies, textbook approval boards and more is to teach history in a way that teaches critical thinking and independent learning (rather than rote learning of a pre-approved narrative) with an eye towards teaching backwards (from the present to the past). Because there's so much history out there, this necessitates limitations on what material can be covered, but it might be a vast improvement if people merely learn that today's issues (and solutions) are often in the past. In summation, teaching history by showing its intimate connections with our lives could promote student (and adult) engagement and renewed interest in an important subject. Who knew?!
While I felt that there was a heavy-handed and often repetitive focus on textbook critique in certain parts of the book rather than little-known historical happenings, Loewen overall got across a valuable point to readers: something needs to change in regards to teaching history. Lies My Teacher Told Me is a book that everyone should read, providing an eye-opening narrative that not only expands on the good and bad left out in textbooks but also conveys the expansive, complex, captivating, and relevant nature of history.
Works Cited:
Summers, Juana. (2017, August 24). Trump's Muddled View of American History. Retrieved July 27, 2018, from https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/19/politics/trump-history-facts-historians/index.html.
Loewen, James W. (2007). Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New Press.
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