Lies James Loewen Tells
In the beginning of James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me there is a phrase that says, “Dedicated to all American history teachers who teach against their textbooks.” The fundamental thesis of the book is that for decades textbooks were written in a pro-American, pro-European style that ignored other cultures and other points of view. As Loewen states, the textbooks “leave out anything that might reflect badly on our national character.” Well. Anything is a fairly encompassing term so let’s pickup a random text book – in this case Jackson Speilvogel’s Glencoe World History.
Here is a brief selection about what this textbook has to say about the past:
- “In 1919 British Troops killed hundreds of unarmed protestors in Amritsar.”
- “While Palestine had been home of the Jews in Antiquity, Jews had been forced into exile in the first century. A Jewish presence always remained but Muslim Arabs made up about 80% of the region’s population.”
And how is the US viewed?
- In Latin America “A growing nationalist awareness led many of them to view the United States as an imperialist power.”
- The Cold War is “An ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union”
- “The Soviets viewed Western, and especially American policy as nothing less than global capitalist expansionism.”
Now this is what the textbook has to say about liberal icon FDR:
- “Believing in free enterprise, Roosevelt believed that capitalism had to be reformed to be saved”
- “The New Deal’s reforms may have saved a social revolution in the United States”
Hmmm. What do these passages have to tell us about World History? For starters Israel took the land from the vast majority of Arabs. America is at least partly an imperialist nation. Communism and Capitalist democracy are relative ideologies. There is not virtue in one over the other.
And look at the inclusion of the massacre at Amritsar. Would a textbook that is built to indoctrinate students in pro-European history have included that passage? The point is not that these are either viable or false views. The point is not that imperial focused tragedies like Amritsar never happened. The point is that Loewen is incorrect in his view of a bias text book that does not show both sides of the argument. Portraying the United States as capital expansionists and equating Communism and the American system of democracy and capitalism, as relativism demands, is not quite indoctrination.
So what does Loewen think should be in our textbooks? Reading through his book one suspects that what Loewen’s ideal textbook would consist would be a thorough vetting of the ideological leftist’s holy trinity of classism, racism and sexism. And of course removal of America’s exceptionalism at all points. Notes Loewen, “In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi – but neither is it exceptionally less violent.” In the 1920s and 1930s Stalinist Russian massacred nearly 20% of its own population. Germany sent six million Jews to death in the 1930s and 1940s. Turkey put to death some 3 million Armenians in the early part of the 20th century. As violent? If there is a historical record of the United States, the nation that sends its aircraft carriers on peace missions and whose president apologizes for mistakenly burning holy books, then bring it forward.
Yet there is one key area where Loewen is absolutely correct as he states in his book about history classes, “Bor-r-ing is the adjective they apply to it.” He favorably compares classes such as math and science as more interesting. But his entire focus on the failure of history to be an interesting subject is on the text book. What he also fails to mention is that in an earlier age, history was considered one of the more interesting subjects. Though the texts can certainly use a brushing up, that is not the primary reason for the failure of students to embrace history. Loewen would have better spent his time searching for alternative reasons and he would be wise to begin with the system surrounding the classroom, not the books laying within it.