View excerpts from James Lowen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me and provide a comment for your classmates to view and discuss.
Lies my Teacher told me excerpts
The problem of history books containing errors and outright lies is a real problem. Check this link to read about the problem Virginia students are dealing with in their history book.
After reading both articles, explain the lies teachers tell and what you can do to improve the reliability of your knowledge of history.
I just read through all of the comments and I am so impressed with your questions and insights. I feel like your awareness of knowledge’s limitations and your role as an active knower is developing greatly in these posts. Also, I can see a slip toward skepticism, which is fine, as long as we have tools to regain our sense of greater certainty. I would encourage you to consider “Truth Tests” as one possible tool.
Well my question is how do we know what truly happened if we weren’t there? And even if we were there, how do we know that we aren’t being deceived and like in that crazy senior thing, how would we know if we don’t know everything? What if this book was telling the truth? Should we not believe it only because the majority of our information is different? Is “majority rules” always the best solution to our problems? What happens if the majority is wrong? How would we ever know the truth of history?
It seems to me that history isn’t really defined. No one knows what the truth in history really is. Historians leave out information and state the main points and even then when important details are missing from a very important date in history the base of the missing pieces to what seems logical and correct to them. History, no one really knows nothing about because in order to know a subject really well you would have to live through it to really understand fully but since no one lived through it who really knows what really happened? We depend on recorded data that we are not sure for a fact really existed.
How can anyone include history and interpretations into one textbook? To what extent is history lost because history was reduced? Why do we learn about certain religions in our history class and leave out other religions? Are those religions not important? Or not as popular? Or are they against our nationalism? Is there a certain way to teach and learn history? Is it best to learn orally or by reading?
after reading that it made me wonder if history is not just a study of the past but a way to influence people with dramatic stories and making one more pitiful than the other.
Its selecivity also worries me. How can a historian chose which major event is better?
How is it possible to summarize thousands of years of “history” into a few hundred pages?
Understanding causation is a key idea in Lies My Teacher Told Me. Should textbooks about U.S. history be morally vague or morally subjective? Is there a responsibility for us to highlight our accomplishments or highlight our failures? How much or our history is a “Disney World” history of clean historical progress? Are history books trying to make us patriotic?
This discussion reminds me of traveling to Europe for nine weeks, and upon my return I knew what it was like to be an American (from an outsider’s point of view). To see ourselves and our history, we need to see other perspectives.
Interesting….. now the question is should we examine the information given to us now? How do we know what we have is accurate? Where did it come from is it an internet source or actual primary source?
In”Lies my Teacher Told Me” is very interesting because it shows how the history we learn is biased and not telling the whole truth. The government plays a huge role in making our textbooks because they want us to have a sense of pride when we learn about the United States, but they don’t want to show the mistakes and the cruel things the United States did to other countries. This is why i think is this writing is interesting because it shows how countries,like the US,tries to cover up their mistakes by trying to make us believe that our country is the greatest. So are kids that are learning about history will ever know the whole truth about their country?
The U.S. does purposely try to make it self look great in the eyes of it’s own citizens. I wonder what if we were to go to another country would it be the same like in the movies where the people in the different country would hate us and discriminate agaisnt our nationality?
The article is interesting because it brings up the issue of truth in the history that we students learn at school. Sometimes I wonder myself if we students are actually learning the correct history of America and other world histories, but who said that truth is absolute, even the bible has been rewritten many times. I heard many times from envangelists on television that you must obey the word of God if you are to ascend to the Kingdom of Heaven, yet the word of God is not the word of God because of the changes that have been made to the bible. One of the largest issues about reading history, is reading translated history. History is lost through mis-interpretation and use of secondary knowledge, which is knowledge that has been re-told but in a different perspective. We sometimes take the limited truth and identify it as the complete truth which could change our understanding of historical knowledge. It’s wierd how a kid from virginia might learn the same history that we learn but have a completely different interpretation of what we both learned. Which brings up the question, are we taught to hold onto our old traditions and culture or are we taught to evolve from our old traditions and cultures?
This article provides a bias knowledge claim that textbooks are bad because “textbook encourage students to believe that history is facts to be learn, but wouldn’t it be right also to say that textbooks are just another form of providing students information? Textbooks may not cover every little detail in history, but the point about textbooks that we use in our history classes is that they provide a broad overview of the information we are trying to learn about and there are other textbooks out there that goes in depth about the particular hisotry event we want to learn about. Isn’t this our job, as students, to find other sources that will help us go in depth about what we want to learn?
The article’s main knowledge issue, in my opinion, is that to what extent can history be a reliable way of knowing? However, is history an important way of knowing?
Well how do historians know that the information provided by the Virginia text books are wrong? To what extent can the truth be prtovided by historical documents? I’m not saying they are right either, but can the information about history ever be the absolute truth? The irony of Virginia having one of the strictest learning guidelines is funny. How can they not spot the ‘errors ?’ This also makes me question wether the other subjects in Virginia are thaught correctly because they were ‘incorrect’ teaching the history.
This book and article has revived some of my memories from my 8th grade US History class. My teacher was lecturing the class about how the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor without warning. However, I heard (where I heard this from, I do not recall) that the Japanese did, in fact, give the US a warning about an attack (not specifically where) and that the US already knew where the attack was going. When I questioned him about the warning the Japanese gave, he immediately disregarded it and told me, “Nope, there was no warning.”
In my 10th grade World History class, my teacher told the class that the US did know about the attack, found out where the attack was going to be at and purposely moved their carrier fleet out of Pearl Harbor for “drill exercises.”
Since the two are both experts in the field of history, who do I believe? Who is more reliable?
If textbooks, historians, and history teachers do not give the same historical details and events, how reliable is history as a way of knowing?
In response to this article “Lies my teacher told me” is a great example of history. This is because it makes us wonder and view different perspectives of knowledge of works.The main purpose of this article is to show us that through history one can make errors because not everyone is perfect but how can this affect the readers? In to what extent can one lie about history? Does it affect the future or the past? Can one control the past by lying?
Reading this article, it makes me wonder even more about the history that s taught to us today, i wonder,” to what extent can history change our perspectives of the future?”. Also,” How can one define truth in history when biases are present?”
It seems that the authors of the book gave more emphasis on the Standard Learning Guidelines of Virginia, “only making sure that they cover the subject areas which are required by the standard.” This is a form of academic slavery because students are bounded to learn the standards given to students by the most important CEO’s in the world. Otherwise known as the “round table.” Moreover, in the history text books we used at Burbank, the “American Anthem,” I often spot how the language is a little loaded and the connotations of the words the authors used to describe the events. It is surprising when you read about the same event in two different history books and you end up having different interpretations of that one same event. It makes us think about the education system in public schools.
Does this mean that the education systems is seriously flawed?
Reading the article, I have plenty of questions regarding the article. The questions are, “To what extent, how do we know that the dates and history are incorrect?” Why did Virginia used a student that is frowned and looks like in trouble as the article main picture? What does the picture have do with the article?
From reading the chapter on history, it states that “since historians usually make a selection from the available evidence, there is a sense in which history books are twice removed from what actually happened”, Is there really a true historian when a textbook contains history errors?
What is consider a “true historian” when there are no perfections?
who determines perfection? what is perfection? How can we justify absolute truth?
Do we really justify absolute truth or our own beliefs?