In some districts, social studies is taught in middle school, history in high school. Some college professors routinely put down social studies as more concerned with building students’ self-image than imparting knowledge. At a conference for K–12 teachers organized by the National Council for History Education, I listened to a famous history professor extol history and denounce social studies. He may not have known that more than half of his audience actually taught “social studies” and were interested in teaching it better, which was why they were attending his lecture. All he did was make them feel bad. He did not help them teach better.
I shall use “history” and “social studies” interchangeably.
Notes will use postal abbreviations for states, “NYC” for New York City; “DC” for Washington, DC; “U” for “University”; and “P” for Press. Dates after website URLs tell when they were retrieved.
2. The National Commission on Excellence in Education came out with the most influential jeremiad of all, A Nation At Risk, in 1983 (DC: GPO, 1983).
3. Later in 2007, a second edition came out, completely revised in light of six new U.S. history textbooks published between 2000 and 2007. It also contained a new chapter analyzing what textbooks do and do not say about 9/11 and Iraq.
4. John K. Bettersworth, Mississippi: Yesterday and Today (Austin: Steck Vaughn, 1964). These were two “Old South” images: a drawing of a white mistress reading from the Bible to a group of slaves and a painting by a white artist showing cotton pickers. In addition, an illustration of boys on the deck of a steamboat may include a black boy dancing a jig; since he is just 3/8” tall, we cannot be sure. Robert B. Moore, Two History Texts: A Study in Contrast (NYC: Center for Interracial Books, 1974), compared his book and ours systematically.
5. John Bettersworth, “After the War Was Won,” NY Times Book Review, 7/25/1971.
6. There are about 250 items because some counties have more than one county seat.
7. Actually, nothing in our book was new to historians. It was controversial only in the context of Mississippi’s educational climate of the time.
8. Loewen et al. v. Turnipseed et al., 488 F. Supp. 1138.
9. Between about 2004 and 2007 an uptick occurred, with slightly fewer students falling below “basic” on the American history test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example. Can we credit the ‘No Child Left Behind’ Act? The widespread use of Lies My Teacher Told Me in teacher education programs? Improvements in textbooks? (The 2007 edition of Lies argues that textbooks have not materially improved.) Increased viewing of the History Channel?
10. Caren Benjamin, “College Seniors Flunk History Test,” Chicago Sun Times, 6/28/2000; National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results discussed in Richard Rothstein, “We Are Not Ready to Assess History Performance,” Journal of American History, 3/2004, 1389.
11. In workshops, I deliver these lines deadpan, and audiences crack up, so I hope readers grasp that I’m trying to be comical. I don’t really believe for a moment that soclexia is genetic. But then, neither is the difficulty poor and minority children have, when they try to learn history from the usual textbook approach.
12. Mean incomes are always pulled up by very rich families; median is therefore a better measure. Data from U.S. Census Bureau, “Current Population Survey, 2005 Annual Social and Economic Supplement,” http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/publications/pubs-cps.html.
13. Charlotte Crabtree and David O’Shea, “Teachers’ Academic Preparation in History,” Newsletter (National Center for History in the Schools), 1, #3 (11/1991), 4, 10. I don’t know that this statistic has improved more recently.
14. George Santayana, Life of Reason (NYC: Scribner’s, 1905), 284.
15. G. W. F. Hegel, “Introduction,” Philosophy of History, widely quoted, e.g., EpistemeLinks, epistemelinks.com/Main/Quotations.aspx?PhilCode=Hege, 8/2008.
16. Nothing wrong with a good cliché now and then!
17. Unfortunately, textbook authors are too timid to use it. “History as power” implies that some people are not amicable, that they may lie or cover up, and that ideas matter and are worth battling over. Santayana’s maxim sounds so much nicer.
18. Chapter 10 will show how the lives of some potential role models were distorted or removed from view altogether during the “Nadir of race relations.”
19. Specifically, from African American culture.
20. Wikipedia, “American exceptionalism,” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism, 6/2007.
21. Daniel Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, A History of the United States (Needham, MA: Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005), xix.
22. Paul Gagnon, Democracy’s Untold Story (DC: American Federation of Teachers, 1987), 19.
23. Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), summarized by Mark Selden in “Confronting World War II: The Atomic Bombing and the Internment of Japanese-Americans in U.S. History Textbooks,” in Andrew Horvat and Gebhard Hielscher, eds., Sharing the Burden of the Past: Legacies of War in Europe, America, and Asia (Tokyo: Asia Foundation and F. E. Stiftung, 2003); Bailey, Pageant (Boston: Little, Brown, 1966), 881; David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Bailey, Pageant (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 822–25.
24. Kathleen Hulser, NY Historical Society, talk at Organization of American Historians, 4/2002.
25. What of the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, in 1998? That was horrific, to be sure, and a hate crime, but not a lynching. Byrd was killed after midnight on a deserted road, and when the community found out, the perpetrators were arrested, tried, convicted, and harshly punished.
26. Sundown towns are communities that for decades were all-white on purpose (and some still exist). See Loewen, Sundown Towns (NYC: New P, 2005).
Chapter 1
1. The average of 1,150 pages derives from these six books: Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley, and James McPherson, The American Journey (NYC: Glencoe McGraw-Hill, 2000); Daniel Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, A History of the United States (Needham, MA: Pearson Prentice-Hall, 2005); Paul Boyer, Holt American Nation (Austin: Holt, Rinehart & Winston [Harcourt], 2003); Andrew Cayton, Elisabeth Perry, Linda Reed, and Allan Winkler, America: Pathways to the Present (Needham, MA: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005); Gerald A. Danzer, et al., The Americans (Boston: McDougal Littell [Houghton Mifflin], 2007); David M. Kennedy, Lizabeth Cohen, and Thomas A. Bailey, The American Pageant (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
2. College textbooks are much better than high school textbooks. I know, because among the first twelve American history textbooks upon which I based Lies My Teacher Told Me was a college textbook, America: Past and Present, unbeknownst to me. As I analyzed how the twelve treated various topics—Columbus, John Brown, and so on—it kept on coming out on top. Finally I called the senior author, Robert Divine, and told him his book surpassed the other high school textbooks I was surveying. “Hold it,” he stopped me, “that book is intended for college students.” I had gotten my copy from a high school where students were using it and had too quickly concluded it was a high school book. I replaced it with a high school textbook, but my error provided a natural experiment that showed college books to be better, especially since Past and Present is hardly the best college textbook available.
3. H. Lynn Erickson, Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Corwin, 2002), 5–6, 15–16, 63–64; R. J. Marzano and J. S. Kendall, “Awash in a Sea of Standards” (Aurora, CO: Mid-Continent Research for Education and Learning, 1998), mcrel.org, 2008.
4. In turn, teaching 30–50 topics requires a manageable class size. Helping 30 students complete term papers is hard. Involving 30 students in a mock court is even harder, and assigning 10 to audience roles won’t do. This need for classes smaller than 24, hopefully smaller than 20, is not unique to history. Nor does it amount to an argument for relying on studying the textbook when class size is large.
5. Near the end of the year, teach
ers might assemble students into groups of two or three and ask them to apply as many themes as they can to the 30–50 topics covered during the year. Make a contest of it. Call out the first topic and ask the first group for a theme they applied to it and for their reasoning. If their selection obviously fits, ask how many groups chose that theme and have them award themselves a point. Then go to the next group, ask what additional theme (if any) they applied, and repeat. If a theme’s applicability does not seem apparent, ask the group to justify their choice. If you are convinced, award a point to them (and to others who chose likewise). If not, invite a class vote on the matter. This exercise not only reviews all the topics taught, but also provides a final shot at telling their importance.
6. Interviews at Williamsburg, 1993; Irving J. Sloan, Blacks in America, 1492–1970 (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana, 1971), 2; Howard Zinn, The Politics of History (Boston: Beacon, 1970), 67.
7. Whether Bush drew appropriate conclusions from the Vietnam War is not at issue here. Indeed, to the degree that his conclusions were not appropriate, accurate knowledge and interpretations of the Vietnam War would be more important.
8. Occasionally, transitions can be awkward. On my list, for example, “Wilson’s interventions abroad, including WWI,” is followed by “Women’s rights, culminating in suffrage,” followed by “the Depression and FDR,” and “WWII.” Still, chronology is the teacher’s friend. As well, teachers can come up with a transitional paragraph, such as—“As Wilson left office, suffragists finally got the 19th Amendment passed, giving women the right to vote. Deep down, Wilson and his wife opposed women’s suffrage, but they didn’t make an issue of it, because women’s suffrage was an idea whose time had come.”—and the class is off and running on the next topic.
9. Cf. Marc Stengel, “The Diffusionists Have Landed” (Atlantic Monthly 1/1/2000, 35–48, at theatlantic.com/issues/2000/01/001stengel.htm; Steve Olson, “The Genetic Archaeology of Race,” (Atlantic Monthly 4/2001, 70–71ff).
10. An interesting graphic summary of a historical topic is Kim Love’s portrayal of my talk to the Annie E. Casey Foundation about “Sundown Towns” (uvm.edu/~jloewen/content/sundown_poster_two.jpg).
11. The introductions to the tenth anniversary edition of Lies My Teacher Told Me (NYC: New Press, 2005), xxv–xxvi, and the 2nd edition (NYC: Simon & Schuster, 2007), xviii, supply anecdotal evidence on this point.
12. Personal communication, 3/2000.
13. Personal communication, 1/2001.
14. That statistic should amaze. A high school math teacher who never took a single math course in college is unimaginable. The same for a chemistry teacher. A high school English teacher who never took a single English course in college is impossible—most colleges require at least a semester of English to graduate. Only in history/social studies might teachers teach with no college preparation to guide them.
15. Teachers must avoid routinely turning questions back to the students who asked them. That can have the unfortunate result of quelling future questions, lest they result in more work.
16. Widely quoted, including on the inside cover, of Robert Moore, Reconstruction: The Promise and Betrayal of Democracy (New York: CIBC, 1983). Today Douglass, who was a leading feminist, would doubtless rephrase to include women, implicitly incorporated in “he.”
17. Some shops won’t even carry them, because there is so little demand. In others, they cost $.50 each. Some districts retain old books and may let teachers have single copies for free.
18. Chapter 3 shows how studying different editions of the same textbook can be even more valuable.
19. Students might also choose to make different lists: the list of a scientist, doctor, feminist, Native American, or transportation engineer.
Chapter 2
1. Richard L. Sawyer, “College Student Profiles: Norms for the ACT Assessment, 1980–81” (Iowa City: ACT, 1980), shows larger differences by race and income in social studies than in English, mathematics, or the natural sciences. Subsequent research shows this gap growing still wider since 1980. This is partly due to the establishment bias of most U.S. history textbooks and of courses built upon them, which especially alienates have-not students.
2. Sometimes they don’t, though, and sometimes their teachers don’t really notice, inferring instead that these students are doing the work, and doing it very well, when in fact they may be doing only an average job.
3. Harvey and Slatin had started with a much larger bank of photos. They discarded images that provoked disagreement among the teacher-judges.
4. That takes care of the minority of respondents who agree with almost anything (called “yeasayers” by social scientists) or agree with almost nothing (“naysayers”).
5. This is not a complete exposition of their work, but it does summarize their most important results. For the complete study, see Dale Harvey and Gerald Slatin, “The Relationship Between Child’s SES and Teacher Expectations,” Social Forces, 54 #1 (9/1975), 140–59.
6. Admittedly, teachers were just following instructions. Absent the request, some teachers might not categorize students that way. However, the normal course of business in many school systems implicitly asks teachers to categorize students in similar ways. Even in 1st grade, a teacher may be expected to form his or her class into reading groups, recommend students for “gifted and talented” programs, and otherwise classify them as superior, average, or remedial in performance and ability. Classes with more than 20 students make hasty grouping more likely, since teachers don’t have time to evoke and learn each student’s abilities.
7. Harvey and Slatin, Ibid., 141.
8. John Ogbu, Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003), 133–35.
9. Barbara J. Fields, “Of Rogues and Geldings,” American Historical Review, 108 #5 (12/2002), 1401.
10. I am not arguing that black English is just fine. Teachers should teach students standard English and expect from them papers written in standard English. Every student—African American, Mexican American, Native American, recent Hmong immigrant—needs to be able to handle and perform in standard English. One reason why students need this ability is precisely so no one will pigeonhole them as incapable. And there are other reasons. Standard English is a marvelous tool, understood by more and more people around the world. Linguistic acrobats like Amiri Baraka, Michael Eric Dyson, and Nikki Giovanni show us the power and glory of black English partly by their ability to frame their use of it in standard English.
11. Most children’s names, whatever their racial or class background, were not identifiable as black, white, working class, or upper class, so a student with a “black” name often had siblings with nonblack names, for example. To minimize the chance that major changes had taken place in the family’s life situation, he used siblings born within two years of each other.
12. David N. Figlio, “Names, Expectations and the Black-White Test Score Gap,” bear.cba.ufl.edu/figlio/blacknames1.pdf, 2004, Journal of Human Resources, forthcoming.
13. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1988), 145.
14. Colleges said to discriminate based on skin color include Loyola of New Orleans and Howard University. Dark-skinned students did attend and graduate from both schools, of course, but in numbers not nearly commensurate with their share of the black population.
15. Sally Zepeda, “Leadership to Build Learning Communities,” Educational Forum, Winter 2004, http://www.eric.ed.gov/; research summarized by Gilah Leder, “Teacher Student Interaction: A Case Study,” Educational Studies in Mathematics, 18 #3 (8/1987), 255–60; Rhona Weinstein, “Student Perceptions of Schooling,” Elementary School Journal, 83 #4 (3/1983), 292–94.
16. Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, “Teacher Expectations for the Disadvantaged,” Scientific American, 248 #4 (4/1968), 21–25. See also these authors’ Pygmalion in the Classroom (NYC: Holt, 1968). While this work resonated with the classroom experience of other educational researchers
and teachers, it proved controversial statistically and led to more than a thousand subsequent studies. Some researchers questioned the findings, but enough studies confirmed them to give reason to believe in their generality. For a partial review of this literature, see Robert Rosenthal, “Covert Communication in Classrooms, Clinics, and Courtrooms,” Eye on Psi Chi, 3 #1 (1998), 18–22, at https://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_121.aspx, 4/2008.
17. Jere Brophy and Thomas Good, Teacher-Student Relationships (NYC: Holt, 1974), 10.
18. I don’t know that he had taken a coaching class, and they were less widespread then than now, but he probably had, given his low scores, wealth, and suburban metropolitan location.
19. Harcourt Assessment website (acquired by Pearson Education), http://www.pearsonassessments.com/pai/?MSCSProfile=DCCDF22EB27065BE59F6DF1149D8E309056625E7E0CFBB13538FF5295779AA2FC7A07AFB567C17D4B53DBD127FCDF6F762DC9B275ECDF487E04B14D809AC2270DA167F890EACCE62D7A190C66FF932E50B5656294CB5285C1D25CCC35A4DF7B69BB7BDC3A442866DEEB2D799C84FD7E40C3B13B259B9BCA9C31C16E03660FCBE&UserPref=culture%5Een-US, 10/2007.
20. ETS has institutional relationships with scores of colleges and universities that might provide such data.
21. Dinesh D’Souza attacked this reasoning in his book Illiberal Education (NYC: Free P, 1991, 45). He seized upon an item using black slang in my “Collegiate IQ Test,” a teaching tool sometimes entitled “Loewen Low-Aptitude Test” (see “Introductory Sociology: Four Classroom Exercises,” Teaching Sociology, 6 #3 [April 1979], 237). “Why a familiarity with this vocabulary is a good preparation for college,” D’Souza wrote, “Loewen does not say.”
D’Souza missed my point, surely deliberately. I make no claim that knowing the word “dashiki” is good preparation for college. But neither is knowing the word “sake” good preparation for graduate school.
For that matter, the reasoning employed by an analogy using dashiki might be more complex than the simple “A”—“A” thinking in the sake item. Compared to shirts, dashikis are handmade, more expensive, more individual, more colorful, and of course African. There are additional differences: dashikis are put on differently and are less sexist, particularly since in the 1970s women’s shirts always buttoned right over left while men’s buttoned left over right. Item writers might use any of these differences or a combination to construct an interesting analogy and attractive distractors. So the rejected dashiki item would be more useful than the sake item in measuring reasoning abilities, presumably related, in turn, to college success.
Teaching What Really Happened: How to Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History Page 30