On April 27, 2012, Thomm Hartmaan interviewed Dr. James Loewen on a segment entitled “Conversations with Great Minds.” Dr. James Loewen is a sociologist and historian with a PhD in sociology from Harvard University. He received the Spivak award from the American Sociological Association for sociological research applied to the field of intergroups. He has experience as a professor at the University of Vermont, and he currently lectures at Catholic University and the University of Illinois. Loewen has also served as an expert witness in over fifty civil rights, voting rights, and employment legal cases.
In his interview, Loewen recounts that his first teaching job was what got him interested in sociology. He taught at an almost all black school, and he was shocked at what he was teaching. The students, and even the teachers, just blindly accepted what was in the textbook, which was complete misinformation. He decided to write his own history textbook and in 1984, he and others historians co-authored their own book. But, on a school board that was made of five whites and two blacks, the book was denied to be taught in public schools with a five to two vote. He decided to bring the case to court and won.
Dr. Loewen took twelve of the leading high school history books in 1995 and examined each of them, at the Smithsonian Institute, trying to find out why students hate history so much. He made a discovery that inspired him to write his book: each book threw together some patriotism, some optimism, and a bunch of misinformation. He also found that, on average, history textbooks weighed about four and a half pounds and were approximately 888 pages long. No student or teacher would ever sit down and decide to pick up a history book and read it cover to cover. Loewen, accompanied by other historians, decided to write a book entitled Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. The book itself examines those twelve history textbooks that sparked the writing of this book and retells history in a factual and appealing way to students.The book itself stands as a testament to students that you shouldn’t just blindly swallow whatever your teacher says to you; you have to think for yourself.
Teachers are there to guide you and give you knowledge, but there is a point where you have to think for yourself. In his book, Loewen takes the first four chapters to argue his point, that the examined books are misinforming students and that history is being re-told, and re-told, as this bland memorization of facts and dates. In the next five chapters, Loewen proceeds to delve into topics that he believes have been blurred and skewed by the recent history textbooks.
Dr. Loewen’s book received the American Book Award in 1996, but many people still debate topics and assumptions in his book as outlandish and wild. Nations big and small try to hide the dark and evil side of their past, for reasons that should be obvious, and when people start to talk about that dark side, others tend to get a little touchy. Loewen does just that; he touches on the dark side of American history so that the students of today can know what really happened, not be spoon fed the kindergarten version of their nation’s past. Things happen, whether they are good or bad doesn’t matter. What does matter is that those things are history, and history should be learned from. Loewen was bold to teach his students the dark side of our country’s past, but he was right. We do need to learn that part, or else what’s stopping the evil side of history from happening again and again.