A Critical Analysis of Lies My Teacher Told Me

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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...

... middle of paper ...

... 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.

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