Lies My Teacher Told Me

postwar America,” in the words of The Challenge of Freedom. It was also key to continued inequality.^23 The tendency of teachers ...

textbooks present immigrant history as another heartening confirmation of America as the land of unparalleled opportunity. Again ...

equally distributed than it is today and that economic inequality increased during the presidency of Andrew Jackson—a period kno ...

censorship of textbook authors. “You always run the risk, if you talk about social class, of being labeled Marxist,” the editor ...

hero, indeed as the hero of their books, so they remove its warts. Even to report the facts of income and wealth distribution mi ...

The analogy of gender points to the problem with this line of thought. How could high school girls understand their place in Ame ...

tracks that the system is meritocratic and that they themselves lack merit. In the end, the absence of social-class analysis in ...

8. WATCHING BIG BROTHER WHAT TEXTBOOKS TEACH ABOUT THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT The historian must have no country. —JOHN QUINCY ADAMS ...

As long as you are convinced you have never done anything, you can never do anything. —MALCOLM X^4 To study foreign affairs with ...

on behalf of Indians, Helen Hunt Jackson. Although textbook authors include more social history than they used to, they still re ...

population. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real test in the coming period is to ...

least twenty European and Arab nations devote much larger proportions of their gross domestic product (GDP) or total governmenta ...

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Textbook authors select images to reinforce the idea that our country’s main role in the world is to bring about good. This phot ...

pair it with “benefit.” Pathways to the Present supplies these two sentences: Multinationals benefit consumers and workers aroun ...

and Haiti to keep out foreign funds. The United States, under the Monroe Doctrine, would not permit foreign nations to intervene ...

Having ignored why the federal government acts as it does, textbooks proceed to ignore much of what the government does. Textboo ...

of our overthrow of Mossadegh. The American Pageant provides this account: The government of Iran, supposedly influenced by the ...

Here Journey offers anticommunism as the sole motive for U.S. policies. Bear in mind that this incident took place at the height ...

misleads and mystifies students. Only by disclosing our actions can textbooks provide readers with rational accounts of our adve ...