James W. Loewen Quotes

The world, of course, doesn’t come divided into disciplines. The world just is.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You go to towns in Massachusetts, Greenfield, first settled in 1686. Wouldn’t it be cool if it said, Greenfield. First settled c. 13,000 B.P. or approximately 13,000 Before the Present. Resettled. Maybe we could say even, Resettled by whites, Or, Resettled anyway, 1686. It would have a different impact. And of course it would help explain why the town is called Greenfield, because it was a green field and the fields were left by Native people who had already been farming them.

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.

There’s no excuse therefore, for a 1,152 page book. I think we should all be using 300-page paperbacks. These exist.

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.

There is no excuse for these 1,152 page textbooks.

The layout of textbooks, I think, has been done with an assumption that students don’t read.

Conclusions are not always pleasant.