Paul Alper sent me this obituary by Robert McFadden of James Loewen, author of the classic book, Lies My Teacher Told Me. I never met Loewen and can’t really say more about his book except to recommend it, but I do have a story to share.
I read Lies My Teacher Told Me when it came out, back in 1995 when I was living in California. I think I just noticed the cover in the bookstore, picked it up, took a look, and bought it. Then at some point I was chatting with someone in the political science department and I mentioned the book. I was all excited about it and I was curious what this professor of American politics thought about it. And he didn’t care at all! I was so disappointed. I’d heard about professors being snobs about popular writing, but, jeez . . . this was important stuff. Then I mentioned Loewen’s book to a political science professor at another university, and he was like, oh, James Loewen, he goes around testifying in court using some statistical method he doesn’t understand. And my reaction (which I kept to myself) was, Yeah, but you don’t understand that statistical method either—and you also didn’t write a really cool book about all the problems with the teaching of U.S. history. I guess it was better to learn sooner than later about these blind spots in academia.
The good news is that my colleagues in the Columbia poli sci dept aren’t like that; they’re much more open to political insights from all directions. As we should all be. Recall that the key idea in our 2016 QJPS paper was anticipated by a blogger (not me) four years earlier.
Loewen famously wrote:
“Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.”
“When questions [in the U.S. history textbooks] aren’t mindless, often they are mind numbing.”
One of Loewen’s favorite recommendations is to teach history in reverse chronological order: start with the present and work backwards rather than the usual sequence. This makes some sense because by the time the students reach the contemporary era they and their teachers are exhausted, having spent far too much time on the War of 1812, inconsequential occupants of the White House, and Eurocentric propaganda.
The second edition of Loewen’s “Lies My Teacher Told Me” came out in 2007.
The underlying reasons for why the history textbooks are so poor remain the same as back when Loewen wrote his first edition: economics and patriotism. In order to make a profit, publishers must satisfy a constituency which prefers uplifting, non-threatening, rote memory mythology over concepts and painful reality. For example, there is no chance of a history text being adopted in Texas if it says that the Alamo was actually fought for the “freedom to own slaves.” Teachers, too, are muzzled in what they may do in the classroom; pity the poor teacher in a predominately white school in a southern state who would suggest that “Gone with the Wind” was an inaccurate portrayal of noble plantation life.
I met Loewen in 2010 when he gave a lecture about the real cause of the civil war–slavery, and not economics as is often portrayed. I brought up the name of Glenn Beck, then the rising star at Fox but he did not recognize the name. Needless to say, much has changed since then.
I think the same can be said about teaching other subjects – statistics, for example. I’m currently reading “A Statistical Guide for the Ethically Perplexed” by Hubert and Wainer, and it is really my first exposure to the role of statisticians in eugenics. I had never heard of Carl Brigham for example. Despite the horrible things he had a hand in causing, he remarkably renounced many of his prior beliefs later in his career – I can’t think of many contemporary researchers that would do the same. All of this fascinating history did not appear in any of the statistics courses I had, nor does it appear in any traditional statistics texts. The emphasis is on methodologies, with little (or nothing) in the way of how these methodologies were used in the past. The apparent implication (wrong, in my view) is that we are beyond such misuses, that current practice is devoid of these historic events.
I’m very puzzled by how so many people think they know what’s taught in high school classes. I certainly don’t, and I’m curious where people’s “knowledge” comes from. From my own experience (public school, San Diego, 1990s), it seems absurd to think that schools teach “uplifting, non-threatening, rote memory mythology” — we read Eldridge Cleaver along with John Locke. I have no idea, however, what the curriculum is, in any detail, in schools in general — even my 11th grade son’s! In the absence of actual information, people pretend that whatever curriculum they fear is what’s in place. Perhaps they’re right; perhaps not.
I think Loewen assumed that most high school history classes teach what was in high school history textbooks, which doesn’t seem unreasonable. And in a lot of schools, teaching history that isn’t “uplifting, non-threatening, rote memory mythology” seems to get you called out for teaching Critical Race Theory.
what’s this?! trying to take the fun out of blog commenting, eh?
I went to public high school in the early 2010s, and we CERTAINLY did not read Eldridge Cleaver.
But in the general case, what’s taught in high school classes is actually extremely available. You look at the textbooks and, to the level of standardization, look at the standard curricula. Example: (of one of the better curricula, imo)
https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/pdf/ap-us-history-course-and-exam-description.pdf
To be honest, this is kind of a baffling comment to me. You might as well have asked “how do people know what Andrew Gelman thinks about James Loewen? Perhaps in the absence of actual information, they’re pretending the opinion is positive.”