Mike Niman responds:

Lies Your Teacher Told Me

In the February 12th issue of ArtVoice, David Cohen wrote a Letter to the Editor criticizing my February 5th column entitled “The Truth,” for citing James Loewen’s book, “Lies My Teacher Told Me,” which Cohen described as an out of date source. Cohen argued that most of the misinformation cited in the book is no longer taught by public school teachers. The problem is that Cohen was referring to an earlier out of date edition of “Lies.”. The book that I cited was “completely revised and updated” in 2007, when it became a national bestseller that should be on the radar of any history teacher. The underlying message of the new version of Lies is that public schools are still teaching the same basic myths despite over a decade of new scholarship in the field that has debunked as fiction much of what is being published in new texts.

For a case in point, Cohen cites the 2005 Prentice Hall text, America, Pathways to the Present, for a passing mention of settlers digging up Indian graves and eating their corpses. This, he felt, negates my complaint that this information is not being adequately taught. Had Cohen done his research, however, he’d see that the new edition of Lies extensively cites and deconstructs the 2005 text that he is praising. Yes, it gives a passing mention of cannibalism among the colonists, which few other books even mention, but it frames it as an aberration, which it wasn’t. And it ignores wider instances of cannibalism and what evolved into a long tradition of robbing native graves (the results of which are evident to anyone who has visited our major history museums).

Pathways appears indeed to be among the least worst of the corporate textbooks in use today – but that is not good enough. Pathways should be abandoned by the Buffalo Public Schools because of its whitewashing of institutional racism in American history. Loewen points out, for example, how it dismisses Woodrow Wilson’s vocal and avowed white supremacist views (Wilson had a big soft spot for the KKK) with one line mentioning how his cabinet allowed for continued Jim Crow segregation in the federal government. Pathways praises slave owner Thomas Jefferson for an imagined opposition to slavery while ignoring his advocacy for the westward expansion of the institution and the argument that Jefferson whipped and raped some of his 267+ slaves. I can go on with a point by point criticism of Pathways, but the fact remains that Pathways does represent a marked improvement over most other books in use in America’s classrooms. The problem is, least worst is just not good enough.

Cohen, based on his ignorance regarding the shortcomings of his favored text and the publication date of the work that I cite, writes that my column would fail the minimum requirement of a middle school grading rubric. Such comments are nasty and counterproductive for a historical debate. But worse, in this instance, Cohen’s nastiness turned out to be rash and foolhardy. Assuming that he is a middle school history teacher, as I suspect, I’d like to think that he’d take more time to fact check and grade his own students work before rushing to judgment as he appears to have done regarding my column.