Textbook Production Theme Analysis

The bulk of Lies My Teacher Told Me examines the biases in contemporary textbooks’ accounts of American history. However, some of the book is also about the ins and outs of the textbook industry. In order to understand why history textbooks are so naïve and uninteresting, Loewen looks at the financial incentives of major publishing houses, coming to the conclusion that, in no small part, textbooks are bad because publishing houses are businesses that need to maximize revenue.

Loewen begins with the premise that publishing houses, just like any other American business, have a strong incentive to make money. Conceived in this way, publishing houses are businesses, and their product is the textbook itself. Like good businesses, publishing houses try to appeal to as many customers as possible by making their “product” flashy, eye-catching, and fun—qualities that have very little relevance to, and may even interfere with, the historical accuracy of the textbook. In order to sell textbooks, publishing companies must appeal to school boards and selection committees, many of which are given only three months to choose a history textbook from a list of dozens. To stand out from other textbooks, publishers use gimmicks, such as visual aids, maps, reading outlines, and chapter summaries. Textbooks that include such features are most likely to appeal to selection committees, because they suggest that the textbook itself is easy to read and appealing to students. However, publishing gimmicks actually make the textbook harder to read and more alienating for high school students: as Loewen argues, excessive outlines and summaries make history seem like a chaotic jumble of facts and dates, rather than a strong, cohesive narrative. In short, publishing houses have become adept at fooling textbook selection committees into thinking that their textbooks are easier to read and more substantive when, in fact, they’re just flashier and more gimmicky than the competition.

While they spend millions of dollars making textbooks seem good, publishing companies often neglect the quality of the actual historical text. During the course of his research, Loewen learned that, despite advertising that their textbooks are written by famous historians, many publishing companies hire ghostwriters to write the content of their textbooks, and then “slap a famous historian’s name” on the cover. Writing a thousand-page history textbook is extremely difficult, even for a great historian—thus, it’s easier for both the historian and the publishing company to outsource the process to a team of ghostwriters. (Furthermore, the historian in question is unlike to face any consequences, since other professional historians pay little, if any, attention to high school textbooks.) The problem, however, is that these ghostwriters may not be experts on American history. In this way, history textbooks maintain the illusion of competence and authoritativeness, even though their true authors often lack any complex understanding of American history. In all, Loewen shows how the need to make money leads textbook publishers to focus their attention on “flash” and neglect content, resulting in brightly-colored but poorly written textbooks.