I live in Texas, and believe me, if teachers ran the BoE, things would be much better. I’m going to try to get on that board one day.

The same can be all most said for Caesar Chavez. At the time he was attempting to organize the “Wetbacks” in California, the state was second only to Texas in cotton production, vast acreage set aside for crops that required hand picking i.e. lettuce, grapes, fruit trees and rice. I am not talking about populated counties like Los Angeles or San Francisco but the unpopulated counties from Bakersfield north along Highway 99 through the Central Valley of California to Stockton. When the “migrant workers” (we would now call them illegal immigrants) were needed to pick a crop in one of these unpopulated counties just by headcount they would often by the majority in that county for the time they were needed.

And if we go back further in history lets not forget the Indian Wars from 1637 through the 1890s, we were pretty good at in wiping out the majority North American Indians and their way of life by the White man.

As a white man who is old enough to remember the Russians marching into Budapest, I am not proud of our history in race relations but it is history and should be covered in social studies. Its all about what a impact of a person attempting to correct a wrong, whether a minority or majority.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to condemn the TBOE, and certainly not the *entire state of Texas*, when so far a few people have come forth with an idiotic proposal which has yet to be ruled on.

Hopefully, the board will come to the obvious conclusion to leave Armstrong and the stunning scientific achievement of Apollo 11 both in the 5th grade curriculum and in the text. (The very argument this review team supposedly made that Armstrong isn’t a “scientist” is both silly and irrelevant.)

Fifth grade seems to me a perfect time to spark the imaginations of young students about what can be achieved through a combination of brain power, hard work, and science. Sure, one could argue that other scientific achievements have had a greater impact on society as a whole, but I still remember learning about the Apollo 11 mission when I was around 10 years old and thinking it was the coolest thing ever, and that science was actually pretty interesting after all. At that age, I don’t think I would have been quite as enthusiastic learning about, for example, atomic principles or the discovery of penicillin (though both are significant in shaping both human history and scientific understanding).

So sure, though a book and a curriculum can’t include “everything,” I hope the TX BOE seriously considers what is developmentally appropriate in terms of making our students enthusiastic learners; when it comes to science, the history of the American space program is a no-brainer for inclusion. And that can’t be taught without including Apollo 11 and the first moonwalk by Armstrong and Aldrin.

Elementary school aged kids be taught this as a matter of course–I’m perplexed that it would be an issue with any teacher/parent group and can’t fathom what their angle could possibly be.