Presenting natives as a 'doomed' race is comforting: "Feeling good is a human need, but it imposes a burden that history cannot bear without becoming simple-minded. Casting Indian history as a tragedy because Native Americans could not or would not acculturate is feel-good history for whites. By downplaying Indian wars, textbooks help us forget that we wrested the continent from Native Americans" (Loewen 133).
More liberal textbooks portray native persons as victims, but often as hapless victims. Such attempts at inclusivity smack of tokenism rather than a real, honest attempt to understand history. In fact, tokenism is also rife in addressing women's issues and issues of race: it is either ignored or bracketed into a safe, confined corner of the text. And history is always portrayed as getting progressively more liberal, rather than engaging in 'backsliding,' which certainly occurred during Reconstruction in regards to African-American rights. Woodrow Wilson, for example, re-segregated the Navy, which had been integrated beforehand, and gave many positions formerly held by African-Americans to southern whites, a clear demonstration that America endured an equal level of oppression until the magic of the Civil Rights movement swept all such concerns away (Loewen 19).
When history textbooks have been constructed to encourage students to engage in more critical thinking, the result is inevitably resistant from parents and school boards. For example, when a text was released in the 1970s in Mississippi to take into account the effects of the Civil Rights movement, there was a tremendous outcry and the state rejected it. Schools do not teach students, they indoctrinate them, and that is why students are so bored by history class -- they know what the neat, uniform narrative is supposed to be by a certain age, and they cannot contradict it as year after year they learn as the same stories about citizenship and the American Way. Loewen does acknowledge that history textbooks now accord slavery the prominence it deserves in the history of the Civil War, but this has been a long, painful process, and only begins to scratch the surface of the importance race has played in the making of American...
Lies My Teacher Told Me stresses how students can repeat the same social studies class three times and still be ignorant of American history. Today, U.S. young adults leave most history courses with the false belief that the subject is only a bunch of facts and dates, completely boring, irrelevant to their lives and out of touch with the real world. Especially if a student is Latino, African-American, Asian or
This is a classic example to support Loewen's thesis of biased textbooks, inaccurate textbooks, and textbooks that eschew controversy. In general, according to Loewen, textbooks avoid the problems of the recent past, must to his dismay. This will only lead to improper education of American students and thus the Vietnam War serves as a solid example of his contentions. I believe that most of Loewen's claims are substantiated, except that he does have some left wing
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