Lies My Teacher Told Me Analysis

“ We give food to starving settlers so that they can survive the winter, settlers end up taking all the good land and let the natives starve to death.” Two hundred years before the Puritans arrived in America the European settlers came over to America accidently. Christopher Columbus was trying to find a new route to India, but landed on an Island we now know as America. When Christopher Columbus landed on the island, strange, unknown, people came up to him. He called them Indians because he thought he had landed in India. While getting to learn more about Columbus the Indians learn they have different values than the European settlers and the Puritans, once they arrive two hundred years later. Getting to know the European settlers and the Puritans, the Indians realized their outlooks on Faith, Loyalty, And Laws are vastly different and similar.

After reading this chapter of Lies My Teacher Told Me, the reader finds out information that is shocking and completely different compared to what they have been taught. Not to mention it makes sense. Ideas have either been falsified or twisted into something that is not entirely true. History textbooks really do leave out the information or give the wrong information, that could really make history more enjoyable and interesting for its

Many people do not care for history due to the simple fact some of the readings in the textbook are not all interesting or true. Not every textbook is the same, not every textbook has accurate information, but most history classes require you to read and learn everything from the textbooks. As you read this essay, you will learn how a couple of different texts discusses the finding of Virginia and about the Indians. Each of these texts are not written in the year so there will be some discussion on the years each was written. Just remember, not all textbooks are the same, in fact, most of them have different facts that may not be all accurate.

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.

The history of the United States with regards to its native population is inaccurate and assumes that the history of this country began when the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock (Richter, pp. 4-5). With regards to the native people’s

“For when textbook authors leave out the warts, the problems, the unfortunate character traits, and the mistaken ideas, they reduce heroes from dramatic men and women to melodramatic stick figures. Their inner struggles disappear and they become goody- goody, not just merely good.” (Loewen, pg. 29). “Lies My Teacher Told Me” is a non- fiction book written by author, American sociologist, and historian, James W. Loewen. The popular belief is that schools buy the textbook that best fits the curriculum, and by following these textbooks, students are learning to the best of their ability. However, Loewen challenges this belief by providing evidence from eighteen different American history textbooks. He believes that people in history should not be depicted as heroes when they simply are not. To continue, Loewen states that students find history to be so boring since they can not relate to it or the people in it. On page 354, he even concludes his book by stating, “Students will start finding history interesting when their teachers and textbook stop lying to them.”

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.

When the first European colonists arrived in 1620 on land in the New World, a disaster was forming. Arriving in what is known today as Massachusetts on The Mayflower, the settlers didn’t have enough experience surviving cold, harsh winters causing almost half of the settlers to die that had arrived on The Mayflower. This had changed in 1621 with the help of the Native people. The American Indians had started teaching the English people how to do many things including harvesting and growing crops. This help from the Native’s had led to the first Thanksgiving between the two groups. These two societies, however, didn’t remain friends. The English settlers had kicked off the American Indians of their own land and tried to make them convert to Christianity. The English settlers had also brought diseases from Europe causing many Indians to get very sick and even some die.

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

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.

In chapter 7 from “Lies My Teacher Told Me was all about the truth behind social class and the truth of what kind of opportunities we really have in America. But not only that, its also about lies in what we are taught and what people are taught to think. This chapter pointed out why people feel and think the way they do. There was quote form the chapter that I liked because it explains that our books and what we are taught gives us the meanings of not truly understanding the truth. Even today we are blind to what the land of opportunity really stands for. “Since History textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what

Soon they were starving and digging up putrid Native corpses to eat or renting themselves out to American Indian families as servants” (p.84). Most textbooks also say that the Pilgrims made friends with the Native Americans and they taught them how to farm the best. In reality Loewen says “colonists appropriated American Indian cornfields for their initial settlements,avoiding the backbreaking labor of clearing the land of forest and rock” (p.85). That’s an incredibly different story than what is taught. Loewen also brings up the fact that despite popular belief, Columbus did not discover America. “Columbus’s voyage was not the first but the last “discovery” of the Americas” (p.33). He also talks about how much of an American hero Columbus is made to be, when he truly isn’t. “But most of them [textbook authors] leave out virtually everything that is important to know about Columbus and the European exploration of the Americas. Meanwhile, they make up all kinds of details to tell a better story” (p.32). Textbook authors never want to tell the whole

I agree with Loewen because history textbooks present inaccurate versions of history by using specific language to influence the way students absorb the information and by painting history in a white, Eurocentric way, and because history teachers lack the interest and skills necessary to challenge what the textbooks

Welcome to Miss Katie’s third-grade history class. To start the class off today, I will first be sharing about the Paleo-Indians. After that, I will be going on to teaching the class about the Europeans and the tragic event of the black death that happened in Europe. Lastly, in class, I will be teaching about what has happened at Jamestown in the early 1600s. This is really important for the class to know because these were major things that happened in the early days of the United States.