Lies My Teacher Told Me
“It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.”
The author is a historian. He surveyed twelve standard high school history textbooks and compared and contrasted with evidence. The findings are striking; they are full of big fat lies, blatant lies, half-truths, misinformation, lies by omission, and melodramatise events. Omission, though, can be argued whether it’s deliberate or there’s limited space. They can’t put everything in a book, right?
Almost all of the standard textbooks the author reviewed were written in authoritative tone. Message between the lines was that everything in the textbooks are widely accepted as facts. The author, however, believe that it should have been written in a more skeptical tone giving out the feeling that information in the textbooks is open to debate because most of historical facts are not cold hard facts.
What I find unique about this book is that it talks about social science like hard science that I’m familiar with. It talks about uncertainty, the unknowns, multiple sources of evidence, weighing evidence and making conclusions based on the strongest available evidence. This book makes me see dead dull discipline like history (to the ignorant like myself) in a new light. History becomes alive as what accepted as facts in the standard textbooks are not necessarily so when supporting evidence is carefully considered. Which is the strongest evidence, which course of events is the most likely? Logic, educated guess make historical facts fluid. They are alive and kicking because they are not dull and dry as they used to. They start to shift and change depending on new emerging evidence. One of the pillars of science is that it is always provisional and is subjected to repeated refinement. History, this way, appears more and more like science as I understand it.
One textbook that the author reviewed proudly admitted that the purpose of the book is to make readers feel good about themselves, their nation (which may lead to national pride, exceptionalism, nationalism, and white supremacy.)
We could all entertain a thought about the purpose of the textbooks. Are they there to indoctrinate, build nation, tell the truth, educate, make people think or plainly make profit? I think it’s fair to say that different textbooks are written in different way for different purposes.
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There are so many sections in the book that I like but it would be too long to put all of them in here so the followings are just bits and pieces.
Textbooks are boring
History books are boring. The stories that history textbooks tell are predictable; every problem has already been solved or is about to be solved. Textbooks exclude conflict or real suspense. They leave out anything that might reflect badly upon our national character.
Columbus’ discovery and its impact on race relations
One sentence that struck a chord is ‘how can a continent be discovered when millions and millions of native American people lived there long before the arrival of the Europeans?’ The sentence is so logical, simple and factual yet never have I thought of it this way. We all mindlessly memorise that Columbus discovered America.
Deep down, our culture encourages us to imagine that we are richer and more powerful because we're smarter. Of course, there are no studies showing Americans to be more intelligent than, say, Iraqis. Still, since textbooks don't identify or encourage us to think about the real causes, “we’re smarter” festers as a possibility. Also left festering is the notion that “it’s natural” for one group to dominate another. Columbus claimed everything he saw right off the boat. When textbooks celebrate this process, they imply that taking the land and dominating the Indians was inevitable if not natural.
Most important, his purpose from the beginning was not mere exploration or even trade, but conquest and exploitation, for which he used religion as a rationale. If textbooks included these facts, they might induce students to think intelligently about why the West dominates the world today.
When Admiral Peary discovered the North Pole, the first person there was probably neither the European American Peary nor the African American Matthew Henson, his assistant, but their four Inuit guides, men and women on whom the entire expedition relied. Our histories fail to mention such assistance. They portray proud Western conquerors bestriding the world like the Colossus at Rhodes. So long as our textbooks hide from us the roles that people of color have played in exploration, from at least 6000 B.C. to the twentieth century, they encourage us to look to Europe and its extensions as the seat of all knowledge and intelligence. So long as our textbooks simply celebrate Columbus, rather than teach both sides of his exploit, they encourage us to identify with white Western exploitation rather than study it.
Examples of blatant lies that reverberate till today
Textbooks invert the terms, picturing white aggressors as “settlers” and often showing native settlers as aggressors. “The United States Department of Interior had tried to give each tribe both land and money,” says The American Way, describing the U.S. policy of forcing tribes to cede most of their land and retreat to reservations. Whites were baffled by Native ingratitude at being “offered” this land, Way claims: “White Americans could not understand the Indians, To them, owning land was a dream come true.” In reality, whites of the time were hardly baffled. Even Gen. Philip Sheridan who is notorious for having said, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”understood. “We took away their country and their means of support, and it was for this and against this they made war,” he wrote. “Could anyone expect less?” The textbooks have turned history upside down.
Yet most of our “Indian Massacre at Wilkes-Barre” shows a motif common in nineteenth-century lithographs: Indians invading the sanctity of the white settlers' homes. Actually whites were invading Indian lands and often Indian homes, but pictures such as this, not the reality, remain the archetype.
In the Hollywood Old West, wagon trains are invariably encircled by savage Indian hordes. In the real West, among 250,000 whites and blacks who journeyed across the Plains between 1840 and 1860, only 362 pioneers (and 426 Native Americans) died in all the recorded battles between the two groups, Much more commonly, Indians gave the new settlers directions, showed them water holes, sold them food and horses, bought cloth and guns, and served as guides and interpreters. These activities are rarely depicted in movies, novels, or our textbooks. Inhaling the misinformation of the popular culture, students have no idea that Natives considered European warfare far more savage than their own.
Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we treated Native Americans than American high schoolers who rely on their textbooks. Hitler admired our concentration camps for Indians in the west “and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America's extermination by starvation and uneven combat” as the model for his extermination of Jews and Gypsies.
Textbooks have trouble acknowledging that anything might be wrong with white Americans, or with the United States as a whole. They cannot bear to reveal anything bad about our heroes.
Racism in the Western world stems primarily from two related historical processes: taking land from and destroying indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans to work that land. To teach this relationship, textbooks would have to show students the dynamic interplay between slavery as a socioeconomic system and racism as an idea system. Sociologists call these the social structure and the superstructure.
Founding fathers and their contradictions
Textbooks canonise Patrick Henry for his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech. Not one tells us that eight months after delivering the speech he ordered “diligent patrols” to keep Virginia slaves from accepting the British offer of freedom to those who would join their side. Henry wrestled with the contradiction, exclaiming, “Would anyone believe I am the master of slaves of my own purchase!” Almost no one would today, because only two of the twelve textbooks, Land of Promise and The American Adventure, even mention the inconsistency. Henry's understanding of the discrepancy between his words and his deeds never led him to act differently, to his slaves' sorrow. Throughout the Revolutionary period he added slaves to his holdings, and even at his death, unlike some other Virginia planters, he freed not a one.
Jefferson's assertion that everyone has an equal right to "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness“ and his enslavement of 175 human beings at the time he wrote those words. Jefferson's slaveholding affected almost everything he did, from his opposition to internal improvements to his foreign policy.
Textbooks stress that Jefferson was a humane master, privately torment by slavery and opposed to its expansion, not the type to destroy families selling slaves. In truth, by 1820 Jefferson had become an ardent advocate of expansion of slavery to the western territories. And he never let his ambivalent about slavery affect his private life. Jefferson was an average master who had slaves whipped and sold into the deep south as examples, to induce other to obey. By 1822, Jefferson owned 267 slaves. During his long life, of hundreds of different slaves he owned, he freed only three, and five more at his death all blood relatives of his.
On controversy and education
If textbooks allowed for controversy, they could show students which claims rest on strong evidence, which on softer ground. The authors of The United States A History of the Republic, have also written After the Fact, a book for college history majors in which they emphasise that history is not a set of facts but a series of arguments, issues, and controversies. The United States A History of the Republic, a high school textbook, however, like its competitors, presents history as answers, not questions. High school students, therefore, wouldn’t have a chance to learn to weigh up the strength of different supporting evidence.
Impact of lies on the populace and education
The omission of crucial facts and viewpoints limits profoundly the ways in which students come to view history events. Further, through their one-dimensionality textbooks shield students from intellectual encounters with their world that would sharpen their critical abilities.
“It would be extremely naive to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices critically.”
Rich capitalists control all three major TV networks, most newspapers, and all the textbook-publishing companies, and thus possess immense power to frame the way we talk and think about current events.
Since textbooks employ a rhetoric of certainty, it is hard for teachers to introduce either controversy or uncertainty into the classroom without deviating from the usual standards of discourse. Teachers rarely say “I don't know” in class and rarely discuss how one might then find the answer. “I don't know” violates a norm. The teacher, like the textbook, is supposed to know. Students, for their part, are supposed to learn what teachers and textbook authors already know.
Education as socialization tells people what to think and how to act and requires them to conform. Education as socialization influences students simply to accept the tightness of our society. American history textbooks overtly tell us to be proud of America. The more schooling, the more socialization, and the more likely the individual will conclude that America is good.
“Do not try to satisfy your vanity by teaching a great many things. Awaken people’s curiosity. It is enough to open minds; do not overload them.”