Lies My Teacher Told Me

On the other hand, they obviously believe that we need to lie to students to instill in them love of country. But if the country ...

courses based on them when students charge that American history is a waste of time. Why should children believe what they learn ...

13. WHAT IS THE RESULT OF TEACHING HISTORY LIKE THIS? William Jennings Bryan: “I do not think about things that I don’t think ab ...

The truth shall make us free. The truth shall make us free some day. Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe, The truth shall make us ...

deal of creative energy in getting teachers to waste time and relax requirements.^6 Teachers acquiesce partly because, as with m ...

This is resistance raised to a high level. Students are simply not learning even those details of American history that educated ...

drama,” one teacher told me. “They all tell me they hate history, because it’s dead facts, and boring.” Another way to cause his ...

Girls also dislike social studies and history even more than boys, probably because women and women’s concerns and perceptions s ...

affluent children. This grave result can best be shown by what I call the “Vietnam exercise.” Throughout the Vietnam War, pollst ...

Most recent high school graduates are not able even to construct a simple table or interpret a graph. Accordingly, I teach audie ...

Less-educated people, being of lower occupational status, were more likely to be employed in a war-related industry or in the ar ...

Today most Americans agree that the Vietnam War was a mistake, politically and morally; so do most political analysts, including ...

children. Successful Americans do not usually lay their success at their parents’ doorstep, however. They usually explain their ...

bombing Hanoi and Haiphong in North Vietnam, Americans split 50-50 as to whether we should bomb these targets. After the bombing ...

Finally, not just the Vietnam War shows more support by the educated. About the Iraq War, surveys by the Pew Trust found the sam ...

American history textbooks help perpetrate the archetype of the blindly patriotic hard hat by omitting or understating progressi ...

who have not. The same holds true for English, foreign languages, and almost every other subject. Only in history is stupidity t ...

challenge of applying ideas from the past to their own lives. They may resist changes in the curriculum, especially if these inv ...

AFTERWORD THE FUTURE LIES AHEAD—AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT THEM One does not collect facts he does not need, hang on to them, and then ...

IF THE AUTHORS OF American history textbooks took notice of the points made in the first eleven chapters of this book, then text ...