MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION SERIES
James A. Banks, Series Editor
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History
JAMES W. LOEWEN
Diversity and the New Teacher: Learning from Experience in Urban Schools
CATHERINE CORNBLETH
Frogs into Princes: Writings on School Reform
LARRY CUBAN
Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society, SECOND EDITION
JAMES A. BANKS
Culture, Literacy, and Learning: Taking Bloom in the Midst of the Whirlwind
CAROL D. LEE
Facing Accountability in Education: Democracy and Equity at Risk
CHRISTINE E. SLEETER, ED.
Talkin Black Talk: Language, Education, and Social Change
H. SAMY ALIM AND JOHN BAUGH, EDS.
Improving Access to Mathematics: Diversity and Equity in the Classroom
NA’ILAH SUAD NASIR AND PAUL COBB, EDS.
“To Remain an Indian”: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education
K. TSIANINA LOMAWAIMA AND TERESA L. MCCARTY
Education Research in the Public Interest: Social Justice, Action, and Policy
GLORIA LADSON-BILLINGS AND WILLIAM F. TATE, EDS.
Multicultural Strategies for Education and Social Change: Carriers of the Torch in the United States and South Africa
ARNETHA F. BALL
We Can’t Teach What We Don’t Know: White Teachers, Multiracial Schools, SECOND EDITION
GARY R. HOWARD
Un-Standardizing Curriculum: Multicultural Teaching in the Standards-Based Classroom
CHRISTINE E. SLEETER
Beyond the Big House: African American Educators on Teacher Education
GLORIA LADSON-BILLINGS
Teaching and Learning in Two Languages: Bilingualism and Schooling in the United States
EUGENE E. GARCÍA
Improving Multicultural Education: Lessons from the Intergroup Education Movement
CHERRY A. MCGEE BANKS
Education Programs for Improving Inter group Relations: Theory, Research, and Practice
WALTER G. STEPHAN AND W. PAUL VOGT, EDS.
Walking the Road: Race, Diversity, and Social Justice in Teacher Education
MARILYN COCHRAN-SMITH
City Schools and the American Dream: Reclaiming the Promise of Public Education
PEDRO A. NOGUERA
Thriving in the Multicultural Classroom: Principles and Practices for Effective Teaching
MARY DILG
Educating Teachers for Diversity: Seeing with a Cultural Eye
JACQUELINE JORDAN IRVINE
Teaching Democracy: Unity and Diversity in Public Life
WALTER C. PARKER
The Making—and Remaking—of a Multiculturalist
CARLOS E. CORTÉS
Transforming the Multicultural Education of Teachers: Theory, Research, and Practice
MICHAEL VAVRUS
Learning to Teach for Social Justice
LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND, JENNIFER FRENCH, AND SILVIA PALOMA GARCIA-LOPEZ, EDS.
Culture, Difference, and Power
CHRISTINE E. SLEETER
Learning and Not Learning English: Latino Students in American Schools
GUADALUPE VALDÉS
Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice
GENEVA GAY
The Children Are Watching: How the Media Teach About Diversity
CARLOS E. CORTÉS
Race and Culture in the Classroom: Teaching and Learning Through Multicultural Education
MARY DILG
The Light in Their Eyes: Creating Multicultural Learning Communities
SONIA NIETO
Reducing Prejudice and Stereotyping in Schools
WALTER STEPHAN
Multicultural Education, Transformative Knowledge, and Action: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
JAMES A. BANKS, ED.
Teaching What Really Happened
How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History
JAMES W. LOEWEN
Teachers College, Columbia University
New York and London
Illustration Credits: Scott Nearing; Minnesota Historical Society; James W. Loewen, James W. Loewen, James W. Loewen, James W. Loewen; Idaho State Historical Society; New York Times; Glencoe McGraw-Hill; U.S. News and World Report; Library of Congress; National Museum of American History
Published by Teachers College Press, 1234 Amsterdam Avenue, New York, NY 10027
Copyright © 2009 by James W. Loewen
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Loewen, James W.
Teaching what really happened: how to avoid the tyranny of textbooks and get students excited about doing history / James W. Loewen.
p. cm. — (Multicultural education series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8077-4991-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8077-4992-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)
1. United States—History—Textbooks. 2. United States—History—Study and teaching. 3. United States—Historiography. I. Title.
E175.85.L65 2009
973—dc22
2009015336
ISBN: 978-0-8077-4991-3 (paper)
ISBN: 978-0-8077-4992-0 (hardcover)
e-ISBN: 978-0-8077-7124-2
Contents
Series Foreword by James A. Banks
Acknowledgments
Introduction: History as Weapon
A Lesson from Mississippi
A Lesson from Vermont
Why History Is Important to Students
Why History Is Important to Society
1. The Tyranny of Coverage
Forests, Trees, and Twigs
Winnowing Trees
Deep Thinking
Relevance to the Present
Skills
Getting the Principal on Board
Coping with Reasons to Teach “As Usual”
You Are Not Alone
Bringing Students Along
2. Expecting Excellence
Racial and Socioeconomic Characteristics Affect Teacher Expectations
Research on Teacher Expectations
“Standardized” Tests Affect Teacher Expectations
Statistical Processes Cause Cultural Bias in “Standardized” Tests
Social Class Affects “Standardized” Test Scores
Internalizing Expectations
Teachers and “Standardized” Tests
Teachers Can Create Their Own Expectations
3. Historiography
A Tale of Two Eras
The Civil Rights Movement, Cognitive Dissonance, and Historiography
Studying Bad History
Other Ways to Teach Historiography
4. Doing History
Doing History to Critique History
Writing a Paper
5. How and When Did People Get Here?
A Crash Course on Archeological Issues
Presentism
Today’s Religions and Yesterday’s H
istory
Conclusions About Presentism
Chronological Ethnocentrism
Primitive to Civilized
Costs of Chronological Ethnocentrism
6. Why Did Europe Win?
The Important Questions
Looking Around the World
Explaining Civilization
Making the Earth Round
Why Did Columbus Win?
The Columbian Exchange
Ideological Results of Europe’s Victory
Cultural Diffusion and Syncretism Continue
7. The $24 Myth
Deconstructing the $24 Myth
A More Accurate Story
Functions of the Fable
Overt Racism?
Additional Considerations
8. Teaching Slavery
Relevance to the Present
Hold a Meta-Conversation
Slavery and Racism
Four Key Problems of Slave Life
Additional Problems in Teaching the History of Slavery
9. Why Did the South Secede?
Teachers Vote
Teaching Against the Myth
Examining Textbooks
Genesis of the Problem
10. The Nadir
Contemporary Relevance
Onset of the Nadir
Historical Background
Underlying Causes of the Nadir of Race Relations
Students Can Reveal the Nadir Themselves
During the Nadir, Whites Became White
End of the Nadir
Implications for Today
Afterword: Still More Ways to Teach History
Notes
Index
About the Author
Series Foreword
THE NATION’S DEEPENING ETHNIC TEXTURE, interracial tension and conflict, and the increasing percentage of students who speak a first language other than English (Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco, & Todorova, 2008) make multicultural education imperative. The U.S. Census (2008) projects that ethnic minorities will increase from one-third of the nation’s population in 2006 to 50% in 2042 (Roberts, 2008). Ethnic minorities made up 100 million of the total U.S. population of just over 300 million in 2006.
American classrooms are experiencing the largest influx of immigrant students since the beginning of the 20th century. About a million immigrants are making the United States their home each year (Martin & Midgley, 1999). Almost four million (3,780,019) legal immigrants settled in the U.S. between 2000 and 2004. Only 15% came from nations in Europe. Most (66%) came from nations in Asia, from Mexico, and from nations in Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean (U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2004). A large but undetermined number of undocumented immigrants also enter the U.S. each year. In 2007, The New York Times estimated that there were 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States (Monday, June 4, 2007, p. A22). The influence of an increasingly ethnically diverse population on U.S. schools, colleges, and universities is and will continue to be enormous.
Schools in the U.S. are characterized by rich ethnic, cultural, language, and religious diversity. U.S. schools are more diverse today than they have been since the early 1900s when a flood of immigrants entered the country from Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe. In the 30-year period between 1973 and 2004, the percentage of students of color in U.S. public schools increased from 22 to 43%. If current trends continue, students of color might equal or exceed the percentage of White students in U.S. public schools within one or two decades. Students of color already exceed the number of Whites students in six states: California, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas (Dillon, 2006).
Language and religious diversity is also increasing among the U.S. student population. In 2000, about 20% of the school-age population spoke a language at home other than English (U.S. Census Bureau, 2003). The Progressive Policy Institute (2008) estimated that 50 million Americans (out of 300 million) spoke a language at home other than English in 2008. Harvard professor Diana L. Eck (2001) calls the United States the “most religiously diverse nation on earth” (p. 4). Islam is now the fastest-growing religion in the U.S., as well as in several European nations such as France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands (Banks, 2009; Cesari, 2004). Most teachers now in the classroom and in teacher-education programs are likely to have students from diverse ethnic, racial, language, and religious groups in their classrooms during their careers. This is true for both inner-city and suburban teachers in the U.S. as well as in many other Western nations (Banks, 2009).
An important goal of multicultural education is to improve race relations and to help all students acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills needed to participate in cross-cultural interactions and in personal, social, and civic action that will help make our nation more democratic and just. Multicultural education is consequently as important for middle-class White suburban students as it is for students of color who live in the inner city. Multicultural education fosters the public good and the overarching goals of the commonwealth.
The major purpose of the Multicultural Education Series is to provide preservice educators, practicing educators, graduate students, scholars, and policy makers with an interrelated and comprehensive set of books that summarizes and analyzes important research, theory, and practice related to the education of ethnic, racial, cultural, and language groups in the United States and the education of mainstream students about diversity. The books in the Series provide research, theoretical, and practical knowledge about the behaviors and learning characteristics of students of color, language minority students, and low-income students. They also provide knowledge about ways to improve academic achievement and race relations in educational settings.
The definition of “multicultural education” in the Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education (Banks & Banks, 2004) is used in the Series: Multicultural education is “a field of study designed to increase educational equity for all students that incorporates, for this purpose, content, concepts, principles, theories, and paradigms from history, the social and behavioral sciences, and particularly from ethnic studies and women’s studies” (p. xii). In the Series, as in the Handbook, multicultural education is considered a “metadiscipline.”
The dimensions of multicultural education, developed by Banks (2004) and described in the Handbook of Research on Multicultural Education, provide the conceptual framework for the development of the publications in the Series. They are: content integration, the knowledge construction process, prejudice reduction, an equity pedagogy, and an empowering school culture and social structure. To implement multicultural education effectively, teachers and administrators must attend to each of the five dimensions of multicultural education. They should use content from diverse groups when teaching concepts and skills, help students to understand how knowledge in the various disciplines is constructed, help students to develop positive intergroup attitudes and behaviors, and modify their teaching strategies so that students from different racial, cultural, language, and social-class groups will experience equal educational opportunities. The total environment and culture of the school must also be transformed so that students from diverse groups will experience equal status in the culture and life of the school.
Although the five dimensions of multicultural education are highly interrelated, each requires deliberate attention and focus. Each publication in the Series focuses on one or more of the dimensions, although each book deals with all of them to some extent because of the highly interrelated characteristics of the dimensions.
This interesting, informative, and deftly crafted book is enriched by Loewen’s extensive and transformative knowledge of history and the social sciences, a lifetime of innovative teaching, and a deep commitment to social justice and human rights. Loewen’s keen intellect, breadth of knowledge, understanding and empathy for the daily life and challenges of classroom teachers, and desire to educate students to be informed citizens is evident and co
mpelling on every page of this gracefully written and incisive book.
Educating effective and thoughtful citizens who can take actions to make their local communities, the nation, and the world more just and humane is a significant aim of this enlightening book. Loewen’s candid and revealing descriptions of institutional racism in U.S. society and in textbooks are not presented to make students cynical or disempowered, but to help them acquire the knowledge, skills, and commitments needed to attain agency and to act to create a better world.
Readers of this book will not only deepen their knowledge of U.S. history because of the hidden and fascinating facts about the nation’s history that Loewen presents; they will also learn valuable lessons about the nature of history, social science, and the construction of knowledge. Loewen illustrates, for example, how accounts of the past created by today’s historians often reveal as much about our own times as about people who lived in the past. He also demonstrates how “learning more accurate history gives students tools with which they can change our culture to make it more just and more factual.” Throughout this book, Loewen explicates topics and teaching activities that will help students to become reflective and active citizens. All teachers—including those in history, the social sciences, the humanities, the language arts, and the sciences—will find this book revealing and engrossing. High school students will also find this book informative, interesting, and engaging.
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