| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. By James W. Loewen. (New York: New Press, 1995. xii, 372 pp. Cloth, $24.95, ISBN 1-56584-100-X. Paper, $14.00, ISBN 0-684-81886-8.)

Almost forty years ago, a young philosopher named Richard Rorty wrote a short, skeptical critique of a new effort to "teach about Communism" in American public schools. An "objective" analysis of communism would have to concede that the Soviet Union had made "enormous economic and technological achievements," Rorty warned; even more, schools would have to acknowledge that much of the world's wealth is "stolen from the poor by the rich," exactly as Communists claimed. As much as Rorty desired such a truly critical discussion, he also doubted that it could occur. "It is impossible for the public schools of a democratic country to . . . call into question beliefs which are central to the general tenor of adult opinion," Rorty flatly declared. . . .

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