Read Lies My Teacher Told Me for Free Online Page B

something she never was in life: boring.
    Woodrow Wilson gets similarly whitewashed. Although some history textbooks disclose more
     than others about the seamy underside of Wilson's presidency, all twelve books reviewed share a common tone; respectful, patriotic, even
     adulatory. Ironically, Wilson was widely despised in the 1920s, and it was only after
     World War II that he came to be viewed kindly by policymakers and historians. Our postwar bipartisan foreign policy, one of far-reaching
     interventions sheathed in humanitarian explanations, was “shaped decisively by the
     ideology and the international program developed by the Wilson Administration,”
     according to N. Gordon Levin, Jr." Textbook authors are thus motivated to underplay or
     excuse Wilson's foreign interventions, many of which were counterproductive blunders, as
     well as other unsatisfactory aspects of his administration.
    A host of other reasons-pressure from the “ruling class,” pressure from textbook adoption
     committees, the wish to avoid ambiguities, a desire to shield children from harm or
     conflict, the perceived need to control children and avoid classroom disharmony, pressure
     to provide answersmay help explain why textbooks omit troublesome facts, A certain
     etiquette coerces us all into speaking in respectful tones about the past, especially when
     we're passing on Our Heritage to our young. Could it be that we don't wait to think badly of Woodrow Wilson? We seem to feel that a person like Helen Keller can be
     an inspiration only so long as she remains uncontroversial, one-dimensional. We don't want
     complicated icons. “People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach
     conclusions,” Helen Keller pointed out. “Conclusions are not always pleasant,” Most of us
     automatically shy away from conflict, and understandably so. We particularly seek to avoid
     conflict in the classroom. One reason is habit: we are so accustomed to bland ness that
     the textbook or teacher who brought real intellectual controversy into the classroom
     would strike us as a violation of polite rhetoric, of classroom norms. We are supposed to
     speak well of the deceased, after all. Probably we are supposed to maintain the same
     attitude of awe, reverence, and respect when we read about our national heroes as when
     we visit our National Cathedral and view the final resting places of Helen Keller and
     Woodrow Wilson, as close physically in death as they were distant ideologically in life.
    Whatever the causes, the results of Heroification are potentially crippling to students.
     Helen Keller is not the only person this approach treats like a child. Denying students
     the humanness of Keller, Wilson, and others keeps students in intellectual immaturity. It
     perpetuates what might be called a Disney version of history: The Hall of Presidents at
     Disneyland similarly presents our leaders as heroic statesmen, not imperfect human beings. Our children end up without realistic role models to inspire them. Students also develop
     no understanding of causality in history. Our nation's thirteen separate forays into Nicaragua, for instance,
     are surely worth knowing about as we attempt to understand why that country embraced a
     communist government in the 1980s. Textbooks should show history as contingent, affected
     by the power of ideas and individuals. Instead, they present history as a “done deal.”
    Do textbooks, filmstrips, and American history courses achieve the results they seek with
     regard to our heroes? Surely textbook authors want us to think well of the historical
     figures they treat with such sympathy. And, on a superficial level at least, we do. Almost
     no recent high school graduates have anything “bad” to say about either Keller or Wilson.
     But are these two considered heroes? I have asked hundreds of {mostly white) college
     students on the first day of class to tell me who their