James W. Loewen wrote the book “Lies My Teacher Told Me” to help students understand the United States' past and how it is impacting the present time . “Lies My Teacher Told Me” examines 12 different American history textbooks and points out the different lies, flaws, and sugar-coated stories found in the textbooks. Lowen explains how textbooks practice heroization and how race and race relations are an important issue when it comes to American history. Among these topics, Lowen also sheds light on the truth about social classes in America and how textbooks lie about the past and try to avoid the recent past altogether. Among the many flaws that American history textbooks have, there is one that stands out above all others. it is heroification. Heroification is, according to Loewen, "A generative process that turns people into heroes." (page 19). Through heroification, national heroes like Christopher Columbus are always depicted as perfect individuals, with only the best intentions and absolutely free of flaws. Heroification to inspire and establish a sense of national pride in students Although it can establish a sense of national pride in students, it does not present the truth, leaves out important details of the lives of these "heroes" and presents only banal melodramatic details. This way students will never truly understand why our "heroes" did what they did, and they will never know the truth. “High school students hate history.” (p.12) Although in the end, that's the point. Studies have shown that the more students take history classes, the less they learn. (p.12) “African American, Native American, and Latino Studies. ..... in the middle of the paper ... of the Americas, what their life was like and how it changed with the arrival of Columbus,' wrote one of my students in 1991. 'However then everything was presented as if it were the picture complete,' he continued, 'so I never thought to doubt that it was.'” Most students, after high school, fail to analyze controversial issues in our society. What citizens know about our past is what they learned in high school history courses. “Today's textbooks hew closely to the American Legion line and ignore the recommendations of Engle and Ochoa. Why? Is secondary literature in history to blame? We can hardly expect textbook authors to go back to primary sources and uncover truly obscure facts. A few decades ago, historical secondary literature was rather biased. Until World War II, history and the social sciences were openly anti-Semitic and anti-black.”