Lies My Teacher Told Me

While reading Lies My Teacher Told Me, many thoughts stormed through my mind where I often questioned by public school education. As any other normal student living in America, it seems as if most of our history classes teach lies and go around the truth. In my life, it has not been until later on in high school where I feel as if I was taught the truth about the shaping of the world, when I had a few excellent teachers whom changed my perspective. Walter Benjamin once said, “history is written by the victors”, and this quote has stuck to me for a while when I first heard it from an excellent history teacher. Most of the textbooks created for American students shows our country as the best and a big brother to everyone else, but that does not seem to be the case at all times. The Land of Opportunity, chapter seven, stuck out to me the most, since it was relatable and connected to my previous history classes.

Immigrants thought that the streets of America were paved in gold and anyone could go from rags to riches, but this was not true at all. Loewen states how, “textbooks do present immigrant history” even though this include the emphasis on rare success cases such as Andrew Carnegie and Joseph Pulitzer (213). In middle school, my eighth grade history class focused on Ellis Island, a place where many immigrants traveled to begin a “rags to riches life”, but my teacher never mentioned that many of these immigrants never actually become rich. Often times, if you are born poor, your family tends to stay poor for generations and