Lies My Teacher Told Me

They hired somebody. I don’t

remember the man’s name.

—BROOKS MATHER KELLEY, COAUTHOR, A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, EXPLAINING

WHO REALLY WROTE ITS LAST CHAPTER^4

Here’s $3,000 for a freelance writer,

and our editorial staff will take it

from there.... They pick things up

pretty quickly, and in a couple of

days, they’re up on the Civil War.

—VETERAN EDITOR OF HIGH SCHOOL HISTORY TEXTBOOKS^5

ELEVEN CHAPTERS HAVE SHOWN that textbooks supply irrelevant and
even erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions and facts in their
treatments of issues ranging from Columbus’s second voyage to the possibility
of impending ecocide. We have also seen that history textbooks offer students
no practice in applying their understanding of the past to present concerns,
hence no basis for thinking rationally about anything in the future. Reality gets
lost as authors stray further and further from the primary sources and even the
secondary literature. Textbooks rarely present the various sides of historical
controversies and almost never reveal to students the evidence on which each
side bases its position. The textbooks are unscholarly in other ways. Of the
eighteen I studied, only the two oldest, published back in the 1970s, contain

any footnotes.^6 Ten textbooks even deny students a bibliography.

Despite heavy criticisms by scholars,^7 new editions of the old texts come
out year after year, largely unchanged. Year after year, clones appear, allegedly
by new authors but with nearly identical covers, titles, and contents. What
explains such appalling uniformity?

The textbooks must be satisfying somebody.

Publishers produce textbooks with several audiences in mind. One is their