Problem Solving

Loewen repeatedly states that the reason for student's lack of education is because of the bland nature of history textbooks. Because of the strict requirements of page length and content, it is practically impossible to write a textbook that are interesting to students. Although history is said to be extremely controversial and dynamic, history portrayed in history textbooks are the complete opposite. This leads to boring bites of information that must be memorized instead of naturally becoming knowledge of one. I agree with Loewen’s argument because I was one of those students who had to cram in order to memorize anything in the history textbook. However, Loewen fails to present a solution to this problem. Although it is obviously a difficult problem to tackle, without a realistic solution I don’t think there is a point in arguing about the problem.

I think that the difficulty with these kinds of problems is that it is the organization’s problem and the culture of the organization, so it is difficult to change anything. Changes that have to do with many people take years and years to change. Even if there was a way to change the paradigm of textbook making, it would take so much time to change everything that it would have become a new era and new material would have to be added and so forth which would make the task even more difficult. I think that a more realistic approach to tackling this problem is to inform students that textbooks are not always correct and that critical thinking is necessary in order to be informed about history. However, this would require a lot of reading and discussing, which means that there will be students that will not read on their own, which would lead to disparity in children’s interest in history anyway. If teachers could get their students to become more interested in history, then I think that would be the best way to solve this problem, but then the problem would be how to raise the number of teachers capable of doing so. It is just too sophisticated of a problem to solve, but I am really interested in how Loewen would tackle the problem (Although he might have written about solutions in other chapters).