Lies My Teacher Told Me

The teacher presents current statistics on high school seniors’ life chances,
analyzed by race, sex, social class, and region—their prospects for various
levels of educational achievement, divorce, incarceration, death by violence;
their life expectancy, frequency of voting, etc. Then students are challenged to
discuss events and processes in the past that cause these differences.
Teachers can also encourage their students to critique their textbook. Each
student can pick on a topic s/he thinks is badly handled, or the entire class can
work together on a common problem. Chapter 5 told of an Illinois teacher who
upset her sixth graders by telling them that most presidents before Lincoln
were slave owners. After her students convinced themselves that she was right,
they were outraged with their textbook, which devoted many pages to
Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, and the rest without a word about
their owning slaves. They wound up sending a letter to the putative author and
the publisher. The author never replied, but someone at the publisher sent a
bland reply that thanked them for providing “useful feedback on our product,”
assured them “we are always striving to improve our product,” and concluded
by pointing out that the textbook included several pages on the civil rights
movement. “What does this have to do with our critique?” exclaimed the
students. Presumably the answer to their question was “It’s ‘black,’ isn’t it?!”
Such an encounter amounts to a win-win situation. If the students receive an
intelligent reply that takes their point seriously, then they have helped to
improve the book in its next edition. If they get a boilerplate reply like these
Illinois sixth graders, then they realize no one is at home intellectually in this
publishing enterprise, so they had better read critically from here on.
Even if teachers do not challenge textbook doctrine, students and the rest of
us are potential sources of change. African American students have actively
pressured several urban school systems for new history curricula. Two white
sixth-grade girls in Springfield, Illinois, who did a National History Day
project on the 1908 riot that tried to make that town an all-white “sundown
town,” followed their project up by spurring the city to create a “race riot
walking tour” as apology and remembrance. Two Native American high school
students spurred the state of Minnesota to eliminate the word squaw, a
derogatory term for female American Indians, as a formal name on the
landscape. And all across America, confronted with teachers who still simply
teach from the textbook, students have challenged them with ideas from Lies
My Teacher Told Me. As one student put it: “I’ve been using your book to
heckle my teacher from the back of the room.”