Lies My Teacher Told Me

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

Another way to cause history to stick is to present it so that it touches
students’ lives. To show students how racism affects African Americans, a
teacher in Iowa discriminated by eye color among members of her all-white
class of third graders for two days. The film A Class Divided shows how

vividly these students remembered the lesson fifteen years later.^11 In contrast,
material from U.S. history textbooks is rarely retained for fifteen weeks after
the end of the school year. By stressing the distant past, textbooks discourage
students from seeking to learn history from their families or community, which
again disconnects school from the other parts of students’ lives.

“Children, like most adults, do not readily retain isolated, incoherent, and

meaningless data,” claim two Canadian educators.^12 Surely they are right, and
since textbooks provide almost no causal skeleton, surely that lack of
coherence helps to explain why students forget most of the mass of detail they
“learn” in their history courses. Not all students forget it equally, however.
Caste minority children—Native Americans, African Americans, and
Hispanics—do worse in all subjects, compared to white or Asian American
children, but the gap is largest in social studies. That is because the way
American history is taught particularly alienates students of color and children
from impoverished families. Feel-good history for affluent white males
inevitably amounts to feel-bad history for everyone else. A student of mine,
who was practice-teaching in Swan-ton, Vermont, a town with a considerable
American Indian population, noticed an Abenaki fifth grader obviously tuning
out when he brought up the subject of Thanksgiving. Talking with the child
brought forth the following reaction: “My father told me the real truth about
that day and not to listen to any white man scum like you!” Yet Thanksgiving
seems reasonably benign compared to, say, Columbus Day. Throughout the
school year, in a thousand little ways, American history offends many students.
Unlike the Abenaki youngster, most have-not students do not consciously take
offense and do not rebel but are nonetheless subtly put off. It hurts children’s
self-image to swallow what their history books teach about the exceptional
fairness of America. Black students consider American history, as usually
taught, “white” and assimilative, so they resist learning it. This explains why
research shows a larger performance differential between poor and rich

students, or black and white students, in history than in other school subjects.^13