"Lies My Teacher Told Me" by James Loewen

Lies My Teacher Told Me argues that the way history is taught to American high school students fails miserably at actually providing them with a well-informed historical perspective. In each chapter, author James W. Loewen highlights a different problem inherent in some of the most widely used US history textbooks in the American public school system, and in how they are used by teachers. In doing so, the book aims to radically change how its readers looks at both their own high school educations, and how they think about US history in general.

Between and betwixt his analyses of the books themselves, Loewen also provides a fair amount of information on the people, places, and events that high school textbooks typically omit Examples include the highly organized and sophisticated Native American societies that existed prior to Columbus's arrival, the brief period immediately after the Civil War in which newly-freed slaves actually enjoyed comparable rights to their white compatriots, and the prominent roles that people and institutions outside of the federal government played in shaping US history throughout the country's existence.

Teaching history, Loewen argues, should not be about transferring facts about the past from teachers' mouths into students' brains. but about getting students involved in the actual process of creating history. Although the book does not provide any substantial ideas of how this can be done, it can help teachers, students, and other people of history-related dispositions gain a much greater clarity of thought on the subject than they had prior. Meanwhile, most high school history textbooks, according to Lies My Teacher Told Me, are having the opposite effect.

The reasons for this are laid out in an exceptionally convincing and well-reasoned manner by the book. Each chapter also discusses a different reason why history today is taught in such a subjective, unstimulating way to high school students, most of which are based on the ulterior motives of publishers, school boards, parents, and even teachers themselves. In the last chapter, Loewen states that "[o]nly in history is stupidity the result of more, not less, schooling." After reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, the truth behind this statement becomes extremely apparent, as does the need to address it.