Lies My Teacher Told Me Essay

Loewen concludes by saying this hamstrings the students and the inevitable future citizens and that we ought to rewrite our history to a more factual representation. One may agree with him that history textbooks are poor factual representations, but it is to important to consider the deep rooted necessity of instilling a permanent and unbreakable patriotism. The American country, and thus its people, have been ever held to the call of nationalism. There is no successful country in the modern world

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.

Arthur Ponsonby wrote a compelling book in 1928 called, Falsehood in War-Time: Propaganda Lies of the First World War, on how people’s ideas of war were changed based on the propaganda around them. He explained how falsehood is recognized and used in warfare in 1914 by every country to deceive its own people. Some events are exaggerated, other events are made up lies and when tried to be proven true, no one has any proof of said events. Ponsonby wrote of how falsehood allowed a person to find an excuse for vamping up their patriotism. The idea and lies behind falsehood allowed a country to gain acceptance for their actions and gather support to the war effort through propaganda that may or may not have been true.

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

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.

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.

America is a nation that is often glorified in textbooks as a nation of freedom, yet history shows a different, more radical viewpoint. In Howard Zinn’s A People's History of the United States, we take a look at American history through a different lens, one that is not focused on over glorifying our history, but giving us history through the eyes of the people. “This is a nation of inconsistencies”, as so eloquently put by Mary Elizabeth Lease highlights a nation of people who exploited and sought to keep down those who they saw as inferior, reminding us of more than just one view on a nation’s history, especially from people and a gender who have not had an easy ride.

History is the framework of every nation. It describes what life was like in a nation, hundreds perhaps thousands of years previously. With history, many citizens are able to examine what lead to a crisis in a nation such as the Stock Market Crash of 1929 or the Civil War in the 1800s in the United States of America. Likewise, the moments of growth and economic success are looked at. From these past endeavors, the people can examine what went wrong and what went right and determine how they can stop themselves from making similar mistakes or act in a way that has been proven to work. In Eve Kornfeld’s “Creating an American Culture 1775-1800,” many different areas of national identity are discussed, including the beginnings of documenting the history of America as an independent nation. This was especially hard for Americans to create a singular national identity because there was bias in the early works, the different colonies or states were extremely diverse, and many intellectuals had different perspectives on the American identity.

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

The book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, begins with an introduction in which author James W. Loewen empathizes with the students. He discusses how History, specifically American History, is taught incorrectly. Loewen is able to share his understanding of why high school students think history is boring. He begins his argument with facts and numbers by saying that out of all the subjects in school, history is almost every student's least favorite subject. He goes on to say that teachers also misrepresent history to students by teaching history as a ¨set of facts¨ rather than ¨showing how we got to this point.¨ Loewen’s writing style is much more relaxed than a typical non-fiction

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

Self deception is the process or fact of misleading ourselves to accept as true or valid what is false or invalid. Self deception, in short, is a way we justify false beliefs to ourselves. There is no doubt that sometimes we are not realistic. Not all of our actions are rational or intentional. Sometimes we avoid reality, we deny the truth, and we fool ourselves. In some cases we may see the world the way we want to, and not the way it is. Self deception raises basic questions about the nature of belief and the relation of belief to thought, desire, and will.

Many history textbooks only tell a single story, often times they are cleaned up before being presented to American youth. Information that is suppressed has left the youth ignorant of much of U.S. history. People like Howard Zinn and James W. Loewen are attempting to change this. They are trying to tell more than one side of the story, they are not suppressing information so that history can be taught accurately. In Loewen’s book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, he states “Textbooks should include some people based not only on what they achieved but also on the distance they traversed to achieve it.” This quote can relate to many U.S. heroes that are

Some would say that the U.S. centric history taught in public schools presents a one-sided perspective, encourages over-nationalism, and impedes U.S. foreign relations. Those who carry these beliefs have coined the term “Americentrism”. Americentrism is defined as “the idea or perceived bias to judge other cultures and nations by American standards or to center around America in news” (Rationalwiki). This in turn is derived from the concept of “ethnocentrism,” or the “idea of judging another culture solely by the values and standards of one’s own culture” (Wikipedia). One cannot deny that the United States centers everything it possibly can around itself. This includes everything from the nation’s curriculum taught in public schools to its day-to-day news. However, that is exactly what happens in every country across the globe. It is only normal for a country to center things around itself because its audience is its own population. This is not necessarily a negative thing either. The majority of people are not interested in the world as a whole. Instead, they want to know what is happening around them on a local, state or national level because that is what applies to them personally. In the case of the United States, there is a definite focus on all things American in the classroom, but due to numerous external and internal factors, the effects of this focus are negligible in the grand scheme of things. Nevertheless, that does not mean that people’s perspectives cannot be

Don’t always trust everything you read. I know what you are thinking, in the world of technology that should be a common place thought. What I am referring to in this instance is self assessments. The ones that are supposed to help you better understand something about yourself or how you behave. Growing up in the public school system, there are countless different teaching methods. The student is usually left up to the mercy of the instructor. There are definitely students who do not exceed in these environments. They have taken assessments that say they learn one way, but the material is taught in another. For that kid the assessment is correct. That brings me to a saying I have adopted throughout life. For every rule, there is an exception. What I mean is, those assessments are accurate for the majority of individuals. The exception is the few who break the mold.