In his 1995 classic, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, James W. Loewen took American history textbooks to task for their rose-tinted portrayal of history, such as glorifying Columbus while neatly skipping over the violence and exploitation that followed his arrival. Textbooks of Loewen’s time were off the mark, but instead of finding a balanced approach, as he wanted, today’s texts have veered into a new set of errors—swinging dramatically to the left.
Enter Wilfred Reilly’s Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me. Reilly argues that, in the quest to fix historical biases, today’s curricula have simply traded one set of distortions for another, replacing omissions with their own brand of misleading leftist narratives.
As a counterweight to Loewen, Reilly suggests that in trying to correct the past’s shortcomings, education has only succeeded in spinning its own web of lies.
He debunks, for example, several myths found in current educational materials, such as—among other topics—the notion that the Red Scare was an unfounded moral panic, the portrayal of Native Americans as uniformly peaceful, and the idea that European colonialism was significantly worse than the native rule it replaced.
One Amazon reviewer put it this way:
History education is indispensable in training the next generation of thinkers and citizens. It is important to be impartial, fair and honest. That which has happened, will likely happen again, may be only a little different. That said, we owe it to ourselves to take an unbias and critical look into the past. This book is an eye opener because it shows how deeply liberal myths and lies permeate american history. There are a lot of jaw dropping truths. It is a fair and worthy read.
Fortunately for you, Reilly has graciously allowed me to share excerpts from his book on Minding the Campus: “The Red Scare Was No Moral Panic” and “Native Americans Weren’t Singing Kumbaya When White Settlers Arrived.” “What’s So Bad About Colonialism?,” another excerpt, will be posted on August 19.
I hope you’ll enjoy those reads, and if they pique your interest, grab the full book here.
Image designed by Jared Gould using assets by bbourdages on Adobe Stock, Asset ID#: 24653978
