Lies My Teacher Told Me: Chapter 13 Summary & Analysis

Children think of all kinds of ways to disobey their teachers. If the teacher assigns students to define a long list of terms, the students might look up the answers on the internet and then send them to their friends. Such actions could be termed “day-to-day resistance,” a sociological term alluding to the way that slaves found small ways to disobey their masters.

Many people would say that students’ “day-to-day resistance” is just a form of laziness. But how can we fault students for their laziness when the history assignments themselves are so inane? Loewen theorizes that, because teachers and textbooks present students with a list of disconnected facts and dates, students “take refuge” in simple ignorance of American history. Thus, many students are embarrassingly ignorant of history because of their history classes, not in spite of them.

The best way to teach history to young people, Loewen believes, is to convey some sense of emotion. For example, people remember where they were on September 11, 2001, because they have strong emotional associations with that day. History textbooks are overwhelmingly dry and convey no strong emotions other than a vague sense of optimism. Thus, it’s unsurprising that students retain history textbooks’ information for an alarmingly short time. Moreover, African American and Latino children retain less historical information than their white counterparts, perhaps reflecting the ethnocentric way that textbooks teach history.

A good way to understand the classist bias of society is to ask students to estimate the percentages of Americans, organized by education, who opposed the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. Most students assume that education correlates with a more pacifist attitude; in other words, the more education people received, the more likely they were to oppose the war in Vietnam. Exactly the opposite is true: while a majority of college-educated, high school-educated, and grade school-educated Americans opposed American involvement in Vietnam, education correlated negatively with opposition to the war (for example, 80 percent of grade school-educated people opposed the war, as compared with a mere 60 percent of college-educated people).

The results of the Vietnam poll would imply that, contrary to what most people believe, educated people are more supportive of an aggressive foreign policy and have less goodwill for their fellow Americans than less educated people. One could argue that working-class people (without much education) were more likely to oppose Vietnam because they were the most likely to be enlisted. But this explanation doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. Controlling for education, younger people are more likely to support wars than older people—if people are just looking out for themselves, then why would young people be more likely to support a war than their grandparents?

Loewen suggests one reason that educated people are more likely to support government policy than uneducated people: they’ve been socialized to trust the institutions of their society—a process partly facilitated by history textbooks. After more than a decade of being taught to trust the United States government, some “educated” people will do so for the rest of their lives, shifting their beliefs to mirror their government’s policies. It’s surprising that education correlates negatively with opposition to the Vietnam War, because most Americans think that being educated means being tolerant and well-informed about the world. In reality, intolerant and dogmatic people are sometimes affluent and well-educated.

Americans’ ignorance of their society has continued into the 21st century. In a recent poll, 62 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement that “poor people have it easy” because they can go on welfare. For the majority of a mainstream American political party to believe such an offensive, factually incorrect statement demonstrates Americans’ lack of curiosity and sympathy for their fellow citizens. And in some ways, it’s easier for powerful people to choose to believe that poor people are lazy and talentless, because such a belief mitigates some of powerful people’s uneasiness with their own position in society.

Too often, we blame students for being bad at history. But the truth is that students are “bad” at history because the history they’re taught is classist, sexist, racist, and dull. When we finally begin teaching students the truth about the past, Loewen claims, they’ll begin to find history interesting.