Lies My Teacher Told Me: Chapter 7 Summary & Analysis

History textbooks largely neglect the history of class relations in the United States. A couple textbooks talk about union strikes, but few give a real sense for the long history of economic exploitation and resistance in this country, or of the problems that American workers face today. Indeed, most textbooks don’t even include the phrases “class structure,” “social class,” “lower class,” or “inequality” in their indexes. In doing so, textbooks create the illusion that class struggles and labor disputes are old, meaningless historical phenomena.

To the extent that textbooks do talk about class in America, they give the impression that America has always been a land of upward social mobility, in stark contrast to the rigid class systems of Europe. Textbooks emphasize pieces of legislation such as the GI Bill, which promoted upward mobility through education, while downplaying bills that strengthened the wealthy at the poor’s expense. Perhaps teachers and textbooks avoid discussing social class because they don’t want to embarrass or antagonize their students. But it’s of vital important that students of all economic backgrounds understand their society’s class structure. When students are ignorant of class history, it’s easier for them to grow up believing that poor people deserve to be poor—since, surely, in a “land of opportunity,” only lazy people fail to be successful.

One clear example of how textbooks downplay the rigidity of class in America is the way they talk about immigration. Textbooks devote many pages to discussing immigration, but they emphasize figures who rose from poverty to wealth, rather than the million of impoverished people who remained impoverished after arriving in the U.S. By omitting the full truth, high school textbooks reinforce the idea that America is the most equitable country in the world—an idea for which there isn’t much evidence. By almost all material measures, America is a fairly average country for equality and social mobility when compared to other industrial nations. Historians debate over when inequality began to rise in the U.S., but instead of presenting such a controversy, textbooks gloss over inequality altogether.

There are many reasons why textbooks gloss over inequality. One reason is that, until very recently, authors ran the risk of being labeled Marxists if they emphasized class issues. Another reason is that publishing boards—i.e., the institutions that control what students read—are often dominated by wealthy people who, because of their own experiences with class, genuinely believe that America is an equitable country where anyone with talent can be successful. A final reason is that textbook writers want to paint a generally optimistic picture of history, in which the “hero” is America itself—thus, they omit the hard, cold facts about class and inequality.

If they were changed, history textbooks could serve an important social function: they could teach students “how they and their parents, their communities, and their society came to be as they are.” But by omitting a thorough discussion of class, textbooks deprive students of the ability to understand themselves and their communities. More sinisterly, in doing so, textbooks prevent working class students from understanding how “the system is rigged” against them, and therefore from altering the system.