Analysis Of Lies My Teacher Told Me

In the third chapter of Lies My Teacher Told Me, the author, James W. Loewen continues the topic of history teachers and textbooks not providing its students correct information, or leaving out details that are important to the specific topic of discussion The first specific topic Loewen discusses is the first settlers of what we now know as the United States. He describes that his students mostly said the first settlers were white men in the 1620s. Loewen then informs the reader that the first settlers besides the Native Americans were African slaves. He then describes that new settlers all over the world took over numerous areas of the United States in the 1500s.

All history comes with contradictions. With every moment in history comes a corresponding moment which can take the accuracy and understanding and change them forever. Throughout time people add small pieces of information to great events in our past. This is where we get the misinterpretation of history. In chapter five of the book Lies My Teacher Told Me, these contradictions are brought into light and force us to look at them again. As I have learned in my history courses we can always question the accuracy of a story but we may never fully understand the truth. There have been three important times I have been through that have shaped my understanding of history today, specifically the part of history dealing with slavery and racism.

High school history textbooks are seen, by students, as presenting the last word on American History. Rarely, if ever, do they question what their text tells them about our collective past. According to James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, they should be. Loewen has spent considerable time and effort reviewing history texts that were written for high school students. In Lies, he has reviewed twenty texts and has compared them to the actual history. Sadly, not one text measures up to the author's expectation of teaching students to think. What is worse, though, is that students come away from their classes without "having developed the ability to think coherently about social

When it comes to American history , the credibility of our textbooks has been a problem recent years, especially those in high school. And what we are taught in class seem to be far away from our real life. Facing such an irrelevant and boring subject, most high school students have no choice but to suffer the course and struggle for it. The book Lies My Teacher Told Me may account for this phenomenon to some extent.

Loewen’s thesis in chapter three of “Lies My Teacher Told Me” was that almost everything we know about Thanksgiving is wrong. For example, the textbooks we learn from only teach us the side of the Englishmen, perhaps to cover up the not so heroic side of the Pilgrims? If you look back with the “common sense” we have now, we would have known it was the Native Americans we should’ve been thanking, not God. Even though what really happened was traumatic for the Wampanoag. History is always written by the winners, so when someone is in search of the truth they may want to get the story from the other side also.

The study of history and the teaching of history has come under intense public debate in the United States in the last few decades. The “culture-wars” began with the call to add more works by non-Caucasians and women and has bled into the study of history. Not only in the study of history or literature, this debate has spread into American culture like wildfire.

James Loewen uses his piece Lies my Teacher Told Me to reveal the flaws in America’s mainstream textbooks. Loewen points out the fact that textbooks try to “indoctrinate blind patriotism” (Loewen 6) and “keep students in the dark about the nature of history” (Loewen 8). Almost every American textbook sells history using the “soft seduction” approach, as explained in Robert Greene’s book, The Art of Seduction. Textbooks try to seduce Americans into being proud of their country by making American historical figures look like heroes, like in the case of Helen Keller, Woodrow Wilson, and Christopher Columbus. “Heroification” (Loewen 11) has a

The book Lies My Teacher Told me, by James W. Loewen, was written with the intention to inform anybody that has ever learned about history, in the United States, using a textbook that they have, most likely, been given false information. The books and information that has been in Elementary schools, middle schools, high schools, and even college classes are skewed, by mostly telling stories in the United States favor. Loewen wrote the book to tell the real stories of our nation 's history. The book is extremely beneficial to the contribution to our collective knowledge and understanding, in view of the fact that American’s need to realize that not everything has worked out for the best for the United States, and for our country to have

James W. Loewen wrote the book “Lies My Teacher Told Me” to help students understand the past of the United States, and how it is effecting the present time. “Lies My Teacher Told Me” looks at 12 different American history textbooks, and points out the different lies, flaws, and sugar coated stories the textbooks present. Lowen explains how textbooks practice heroification, and how race and race relations are a major issue when it comes to American history. Among these topics, Lowen also sheds light on the truth about social classes in America, and how textbooks lie about the past and try to avoid the recent past all together.

Sending kids to school knowing that they are going for educational purposes and then restricting them on what they can and cannot learn is hypocritical. Schools should be allowed to keep Fahrenheit 451 in their curriculum. Controversial issues are brought up everyday in and out of school and issues, like profanity, included in a book gives the story emotion and sets the tone. Timothy Jay, a psychologist and linguist, argues,

Why should high schoolers be forced to read a book that isn’t interesting to them? Often times they either do not apply to real life situations or even teach anything that a teenager would understand. So, the high schooler skims through the book and does not pay attention to any detail. High school classrooms need better books that can teach history in a fun way, and add some interesting things to which students can reflect and think on. A book read in high school, should allow the students to think critically about the text they are reading, should include some references to history, and incorporate themes that are understandable and relatable to a high school student’s life. This makes a book want to be read as well as enjoyable. The

"It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many

An English teacher, Benjamin Dancer states in his article, Censoring American History, “History curriculum, a framework written by the College Board and taught in high schools across the country. The framework was revamped this year and has taken heat from the Republican National Committee, which claims it “emphasizes negative aspects of our nation’s history”. There are positive and negative aspects of every nation’s history, students are not in the position to pick and choose which historical events are taught in schools. By picking and choosing historical events that are only positive and practical to what students want to believe, history will be lost and replaced with fraudulent and bogus events that never took

The author begins to talk about Harvard Historian, Samuel Morison. Morison had a different way of conveying history compared to your average history text book. As Zin puts it that one can lie about the past or tell facts that lead to conclusions found as unacceptable then concluding that Morison does neither (8). Which means that Samuel tells the truth and only the truth about his subject. Which provides an interesting take on retelling history based on how it’s told. That way is by stating facts of

Should history be written in the form of a lesson? What lessons might such historical accounts teach us? Is history meant to teach racism, sexism, or morality? If a source is predisposed to sexism, racism, or religion, does it lose all value to historians? A man named Guillaume Le Sueur, author of Admirable History of a False and Supposed Husband, instructs that, “God in his judgments, which are unknown to us, discovers all inequity, although we have long concealed it” (Sueur 10). Le Sueur’s document is a prime example of an historical document that shapes histories towards the author’s own ideas rather than an impartial account of history. Despite the inaccuracies of primary sources it does not mean that it loses all value. History is not without its partiality, however, that does not mean that it loses all value. Even if the source is predisposed to a certain aspect of the writer, the insight that can be taken from the writer’s perspective can be applied to help historians answer questions about the society.