IF THE AUTHORS OF American history textbooks took notice of the points
made in the first eleven chapters of this book, then textbooks would be far less
likely to present, and teachers to teach, distorted and indefensibly incomplete
accounts of our past. Lies My Teacher Told Me is itself incomplete, however.
It says little about Hispanic history, for example.Yet our textbooks are so
Anglocentric that they might be considered Protestant history.^5 What about
women’s history and the history of gender in America, two different but related
topics? Lies mentions both subjects from time to time but makes no thorough
critique of how textbooks present women’s history and gender issues.^6 And
what about the next lie? The next historical marker, commemorative statue,
museum exhibit, feature film set in the American past, television miniseries, or
historical novel will probably pass on more misinformation. At the least, it
will present its topic incompletely and partially. What is to be done about
these future lies?
The answer is not to expand Lies My Teacher Told Me to cover every
distortion and error in history as traditionally taught, to say nothing of the
future lies yet to be developed. That approach would make me the arbitrator—
I who surely still unknowingly accept all manner of hoary legends as historical
fact.^7 Instead, the answer is for all of us to become, in Postman and
Weingartner’s vulgar term, “crap detectors”^8 —independent learners who can
sift through arguments and evidence and make reasoned judgments. Then we
will have learned how to learn, as Postman and Weingartner put it, and neither
a one-sided textbook nor a one-sided critique of textbooks will be able to
confuse us.
To succeed, schools must help us learn how to ask questions about our
society and its history and how to figure out answers for ourselves. At this
crucial task most American history textbooks and courses fail miserably.
Part of the problem is with form. Because they try to cover so many things,
textbooks, at least as currently incarnated, cannot effectively acquaint students
with issues and controversies and thereby with historical argument, with its
attendant skills of using logic and marshaling evidence to persuade.
Mentioning is part of the problem. Even when textbooks discredit the myths
that clog our historical arteries, students don’t retain the tiny rebuttals in their
history textbooks.^9 They forget the untoward fact that contradicts the myth, for
it doesn’t fit with the powerful archetype. History textbooks and teachers must
make special efforts and take enough time to teach effectively against these