A New Look at Teaching History

Rutland Herald

By BRENDAN McKENNA

CASTLETON — "Lies My Teacher Told Me" hardly seems the sort of title that would draw a warm reception at a conference of history teachers.

But author James Loewen's presentation encouraging teachers to go beyond textbooks to encourage students to think critically drew nods of appreciation and murmurs of agreement from the teachers assembled at Castleton State College's Summer Seminar 2005.

"I emphasize that if you just teach from the texts, you're teaching what I call B.S. — bad sociology," Loewen said in a brief interview before a discussion section with the teachers. "Textbooks are still filled with lies, terrible distortions and even white supremacy. The better thing to do, which I think is more interesting, is to get the students to challenge the text."

Right from the beginning of virtually every history text, Loewen said, there are flaws.

"When did people first get here?" Loewen rhetorically asked. "Every text I've seen but one picks a date. In fact, it's a big archeological controversy. And how did we get here? Every single one says people walked across the Bering Strait during an ice age, but that's only a theory. It's equally possible they could have come by boat."

Loewen also takes issue with the assertion made in many texts that Columbus proved the world was round, noting that it was actually common knowledge — especially among sailors who could observe the phenomenon — in the late 1400s.

"But it shows progress, that we're always becoming smarter," he said. "We aren't always getting smarter or more knowledgeable, but the Columbus myth fits in with that meta-narrative."

Those distortions, and other examples Loewen cites in his books "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong" and "Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong," make his message all the more important.

"During history, we encourage students to think about the issues of the past," he said. "We should present a series of issues rather than a series of facts to memorize. It encourages citizenship and gets the students thinking about what to do next."

While many teachers present seemed sympathetic to Loewen's approach, one questioned the wisdom of his approach for Advanced Placement classes that high school students take for college credit.

"I think the A.P. U.S. history test is above average, especially compared to the SAT," Loewen said. "There are two ways to teach for the APUSH. You can teach the text twice as hard, having the students memorize 8,000 twigs (dates) instead of 4,000. The other way to do it is to assign a text and my book or Howard Zinn's 'People's History of the United States.' … I get lots of e-mails from students who were very successful or whole classes that were very successful."

He said, "My assertion is that the way to get a student to remember 8,000 twigs is not just to teach 8,000 twigs."

Loewen also encouraged teachers to become more active in encouraging students to do oral and local history projects.

"It's especially good for middle school students," Loewen said, noting that high school curricula can sometimes contain too much information to allow for such digressions. "Get them out there to interview the old folks. I've gotten some of the damndest findings from those kinds of projects."

He said, "Fifty years later, this becomes a heck of a resource for people like me, doing this research. And get them to enter the National History Day competition. It's like a science fair for history."

Louis DiAngelo, an eighth-grade teacher at Rutland Middle School, said he found the presentation valuable.

"It presents a whole other aspect of history, things we take for granted have a whole other side," he said. "He makes (specific) points in his presentation about ways we can teach things. As far as I'm concerned, this is a really beneficial course. … It's always interesting to break up what you're doing and consider different styles of learning."

Contact Brendan McKenna at brendan.mckenna@rutlandherald.com.

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