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Lies My Teacher Told Me

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Submitted By leonie23
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Sarah Whittaker

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“Lies my teacher told me”

This interview opened my eyes up to how history is really written in the United States and shows that it is written by the victors which is why there are so many inaccuracies in our history. The reason Loewen says as to why history textbooks are distorted is because they want to avoid controversy and don’t want to put anything in textbooks that will show the history of the United States in a bad light and want to show the United States as heroes. To make his point, Loewen emphasizes the "dark side" of U.S. history, because that's the part that's missing from our education system. So, for example, we never learned that Woodrow Wilson ran one of the most racist administrations in history and helped to set back progress in race relations that had begun after the Civil War. Helen Keller's socialist leanings and political views are omitted and we only learn that she overcame blindness and deafness. John Brown is portrayed as a wild-eyed nut that ran amok until he was caught and hung, rather than an eloquent and dedicated abolitionist who expressed some of the same views as Lincoln.

Loewen's book illustrates the saying that "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Ignorance of our real history also renders us incapable of fully understanding the present and coming to grips with the issues of our time. Reconstruction, which textbooks put the blame on black people for the failure to integrate with society; the Civil War, which supposedly started because the South wanted more state power; treatment of Native Americans, taught to be a natural cause of a progressive world and society. This history casts current racial attitudes and issues in a different light than most of our high school graduates are likely to see unless they are taught the complete history of their

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