36+ James W. Loewen Quotes On Education, Critical And Satirical

James W. Loewen is an American sociologist and author. He is best known for his 1995 book, Lies My Teacher Told Me, which critically examines how history is taught in American schools. Loewen has written several other books, including The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader, Sundown Towns, and Lies Across America. Following is our collection on famous quotes by James W. Loewen on education, leadership, love.

Top 10 James W. Loewen Quotes

1. The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.
2. Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat the eleventh grade.
3. Students will start finding history interesting when their teachers and textbooks stop lying to them.
4. History is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we got to this point.
5. Many Americans have never owned a book, and I'm not talking about because of the recent digital revolution. I'm talking about before there even was a digital revolution.
6. Conclusions are not always pleasant.
7. There's no excuse therefore, for a 1,152 page book. I think we should all be using 300-page paperbacks. These exist.
8. I'm looking forward to the future, which is a good thing, because it's coming.
9. All of the common core standards stuff about critical reading and critical thinking and so on can only be positive.
10. Textbooks are written in an oracular monotone, so that they claim to be true and important.

James W. Loewen Short Quotes

• We preach democracy while supporting dictatorships.
• History can be a weapon, and it can be used against you.
• Teachers need to teach the subject rather than to teach the textbook.
• It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit.
• Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.
• There is no excuse for these 1,152 page textbooks.
• The world, of course, doesn't come divided into disciplines. The world just is.
• The layout of textbooks, I think, has been done with an assumption that students don't read.

James W. Loewen Famous Quotes And Sayings

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass. — James W. Loewen

Unfortunately, marketing textbooks is like marketing fishing lures: the point is to catch fishermen, not fish. Thus many adopted textbooks are flashy to catch the eye of adoption committees but dull when read by students. — James W. Loewen

Native Americans are not and must not be props in a sort of theme park of the past, where we go to have a good time and see exotic cultures. “What we have done to the peoples who were living in North America” is, according to anthropologist Sol Tax, “our Original Sin. — James W. Loewen

Textbooks should show that neither morality nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by history. Merely being part of the United States, without regard to our own acts and ideas, does not make us moral or immoral beings. History is more complicated than that. — James W. Loewen

We still have to realize that if you are say a historian of the Civil War, you don’t know anything special about say Columbus or for that matter the 20th century. You are a consumer of that information, especially if it’s stuff like Columbus and the American Indians. That information isn’t even in history, much of it. Much of it is in anthropology or archeology. — James W. Loewen

Many Americans have never owned a book. And others have never owned a non-fiction book. Providing them with a 300-page paperback would get them started, maybe. And even if it didn't, at least they'd own that one. So that's a serious problem. — James W. Loewen

People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Evidence must be located, not created, and opinions not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight. — James W. Loewen

In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent. — James W. Loewen

Columbus not only sent the first slaves acroiss the Atlantic, he sent more slaves than any other individual — James W. Loewen

Nobody would ever want to read a textbook about the Civil War and then interrupt that for two pages about water rights in the west. — James W. Loewen

Textbooks pretty much have no real drama. They have no real storyline. To the extent they have a storyline. — James W. Loewen

I often suggest in workshops that if you have 30 students in your American History course in 11th grade, or whatever grade level, that you maybe triple them up. You put, and have them choose, let's say 11 different Native American cultures. Maybe you give them a list of 15 and they choose 11 of those 15 so that they have some choice in the matter. — James W. Loewen

I don't think teachers read the textbooks. And I don't think adoption committees read the textbooks before they adopt them. I think they look at them. — James W. Loewen

I think the first important thing is that usually most textbooks are not written by their authors. And so by author I mean the people who did not write them; so it's a new definition of "author." — James W. Loewen

As a result of the sufferings and hard labor they endured, the Indians choose and have chosen suicide. Occasionally a hundred have committed mass suicide. The women, exhausted by labor, have shunned conception and childbirth . . . Many, when pregnant, have taken something to abort and have aborted. Others after delivery have killed their children with their own hands, so as not to leave them in such oppressive slavery. — James W. Loewen

What gets lost in the textbook is the overall narrative. It gets lost in all the boxes and all the photos and all the little stuff that's stuck in all the time. — James W. Loewen

I've been in towns where there is no library, or where the library for the high school and the library for the town is one room, and it's smaller than my modest living room here. So you don't have many resources in 1950 or even 1970. This is the year, 2013, every town in America is connected to the web. Every town in America is therefore connected to all kinds of resources at the Library of Congress, at 100,000 websites. — James W. Loewen

It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit... No one likes to think of him or herself as a bad person. To treat badly another person whom we consider a reasonable human being creates a tension between act and attitude that demands resolution. We cannot erase what we have done, and to alter our future behavior may not be in our interest. To change our attitude is easier. — James W. Loewen

Life Lessons by James W. Loewen

1. James W. Loewen's work provides an important reminder that history is often written from a biased perspective and that it is important to consider multiple sources when forming an opinion.
2. Loewen's research also highlights the need to question the accuracy of the information we are presented with, as well as its implications for our understanding of the past.
3. Finally, Loewen's work demonstrates the power of critical thinking and encourages us to think critically about the stories we are told and the interpretations we make.