A Critical Analysis of Lies My Teacher Told Me Essay -- James Loewen A

A Critical Analysis of:Lies My Teacher Told Me "It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things which are not so." -FELIX OKOYE Out of all forms of literature currently known to man, educational textbooks are arguably the least interesting. On top of being incredibly boring, textbooks, especially American history ones, neglect to include the entirety of the information that it should. Because American history textbooks wish only to paint the United States in a bright light, the authors opt to leave out anything that may hurt its image. What Lies My Teacher Told Me attempts to do is lay out uncommonly known facts for the misinformed history students of today. While it does succeed in bringing forth some good points and fundamental flaws within the educations of the ordinary history student, it itself fails to correct one of the very reasons it claims that history books are so bad. The information within this book is accurate and would be stimulating in every way had it only been arranged in a coherent and interesting matter. However, after only a chapter the reader is struggling to stay awake with the incredibly boring style of writing and is trying to sort through and organize all of the randomly arranged thoughts that make this more misleading than the history textbooks it attempts to defraud. To open up the book, Loewen tried to explain exactly why history textbooks are so hated. He brings up the very good point that they are, in fact, boring, and uses that as a launching pad to show that the only reason they are boring is the fact that they leave out so much controversy and information that i... ... less than the rest of the country. While it was still interesting information, he could have cut many things out which, in a sense, take away from his message that history neglects to teach certain things because some of these things were, in fact, taught. The rest of this book follows a similar pattern of proposing great ideas without any follow through, or if there is follow through, it is too boring and misleading to appreciate. While this book had the potential of being a great in consideration to the teachings of American history due to its ability to identify little known facts about the United States, it is too flawed to even be thought of as anything impactful. Work Cited Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.