California 4th Grade Mission Project

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Fourth grade students enrolled in California public schools are taught about the role the California missions founded in the late 1700s and early 1800s played in the State's development. Many California school districts have the students create a multiple-medium project, such as writing a paper or building a model of a mission.

This topic is controversial in that it is often taught in a way that shows the missions as great cultural centers for the California Indians without mentioning that they were used to convert local Indians to Catholicism, sometimes coercively. Discussion of revolts where Indians attacked missions are generally missing from the Fourth-grade curriculum.

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