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Neil Armstrong isn't worthy of Texas textbooks? [Because he never walked on The Moon]

As some readers may know, Texas State Board of Education has held meetings this week (read more) to conduct a variety of business. Fortunately they haven't engaged in their anti-science attacks on evolution, but there have been other questionable actions.

As part of the process a Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills review team composed of parents and teachers has suggested removing Neil Armstrong from a "science strand" in a 5th grade social studies book.

Effectively this would remove the mention of Armstrong has a figure of historical significance from 5th grade textbooks. I asked board spokeswoman Debbie Ratcliffe why this change was made and she explained:

The team said they made this proposal because he was not a scientist. The State Board of Education has not voted for or against that proposal yet. It won't vote on the social studies proposal until January.

I can sympathize with board members who do not want to over-burden students with names, dates and places. I've written before that we should teach our children how to learn, rather than how to memorize. But Neil Armstrong?

He's the single-most identifiable figure associated with NASA, and certainly took the space agency's most inspirational leap. If students cannot appreciate the science underlying launching a man to the moon, what can inspire them?

Moreover, how significant has the presence of NASA's human spaceflight home in Houston been to the science community and economy of Texas?

By the way, Armstrong arguably was a scientist. He received an aeronautical engineering from Purdue University, and a Master of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California. He later was a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati.

Keep Armstrong.

http://blogs.chron.com/sciguy/archives/2009/09/neil_armstrong_isnt_wor
thy_of_texas_textbooks.html

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"I'm a former history teacher and I can tell you many history books today do not include the moon landings. With the level of science being taught in todays public schools many questions would be brought up during history class when discussing the moon missions, so they just took them out of most history books all together to avoid questioning the actual events. People just accept it as fact when it is fiction. I studied the moon landings back in the mid 1990's and I concluded that it must have been faked for a large number of reasons. My favorite besides the science behind it is that we went to the moon with the computer power of todays basic calculator. Makes me giggle everytime I think about it."
http://forum.prisonplanet.com/index.php?topic=47982.0

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