"Lies My Teacher Told Me"

(Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong)
-by james w. loewen
2007
Within a chapter, i knew it was one of the greatest books i'd ever read, one that will soon appear on my "required reading for every human" list: http://nakedmeadow.blogspot.com/2008/12/8-books.html. In 1995, loewen deconstructed twelve high school history textbooks to find out what they say, what they don't, and then he sought to find out why. He investigates why history classes are the subject of such profound student apathy. It turns out that students are too smart for the crap we feed them. When presented with a history which celebrates only the eurocentric american experience and avoids the hint of anything even the tiniest bit controversial, students subconsciously know they're being conned, and manifest resistance behavior. Loewen offers statistics on how history is unique among school subjects, in that the more classes one takes, the more measurably dumb one becomes. The higher one climbs on the educational ladder, the more one identifies with one's society, and subconsciously adopts the view that one's country is "right". Loewen also talks about the myth of american exceptionalism, inherent in which is the notion that our moral and ethical growth has been an upward constant. As just one rather stunning counter-example, in 1870 a white state senator from Mississippi married a black woman...and got re-elected. To say nothing about this continent's ethical/moral plane pre-columbus, which was at a level we're still well short of. And don't get loewen started on columbus. Not only did people NOT think the world was flat before he sailed, he was quite the johnny-come-lately, as archaeological evidence suggests that sailors from Indonesia, Africa, Asia, and other parts of Europe explored this land centuries, if not millenia, before columbus. To say nothing of explorers from this land themselves, who visited Scotland or Scandinavia some two thousand years ago. But columbus fits the "Europe-leading-the-world" archetype, so hey-ho, with columbus we go! Anyway, there's lots more, and it's not all euro-bashing; i'm much more a lincoln fan now than ever before.