"High school students hate history." So begins the powerful book Lies My Teacher Told Me, by James Loewen, which seeks to establish the underlying reasons for why this statement is all too often a true one. As Loewen puts it: "Our situation is this: American history is full of fantastic and important stories. These stories have the power to spellbind audiences, even audiences of difficult seventh gradersà Yet they sleep through the classes that present it" (Loewen, intro). In order to solve this riddle, Loewen examines twelve history textbooks used in American classrooms.
Loewen's book is a dual analysis of the content and style of the history books used in American classrooms (average weight: 4.5 pounds; average length: 888 pages). Much to the author's chagrin, this analysis established not just that history textbooks are boring (though, not surprisingly to anybody who has studied history in high school, Loewen believes that they are in fact boring) but that they focus almost exclusively on a Euro-centric view of the world and that this Euro-centrism results in a slew of historical inaccuracies. More damning, however, is Loewen's other conclusion: that American history books focus on the patriotic highlights of our nation's history rather than fomenting critical thinking skills. The ensuing focus on memorization of significant dates and personages, Loewen argues, results in students being able to parrot these facts but not being able to draw significant conclusions about historic events or make connections between events occurring in different time periods that are related in some way.
Throughout the course of the book, Loewen analyzes specific topics in American history to examine their treatment by the history books being used in American classrooms. Topics dissected include Christopher Columbus, Thanksgiving, John Brown and the Civil War, and Abraham Lincoln's views on slavery. One of Loewen's main conclusion...