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How ‘Schoolhouse Rock!’ Sometimes Taught an Entire Generation History Completely Wrong
At least the songs were catchy
If you were a kid in America in the 1970s and 1980s, one of the staples of your Saturday morning cartoon viewing was Schoolhouse Rock! Starting in 1973, the animated musical series successfully snuck in educational programming by taking things like grammar (with Grammar Rock) and math (with Multiplication Rock) and presenting them with catchy songs. The short films taught us that three was a magic number and the joy of adverbs in a way that our teachers never could; when I write today I can still hear “lolly, lolly, lolly, get your adverbs here” in my head.
This was all good until September 20, 1975. It was on that fateful day, in anticipation of America’s upcoming bicentennial on July 4, 1976, that the series launched what they jingoistically called “America Rock.” I didn’t realize it as a nine-year-old in 1975, but that is where the wheels started to come off the series (in my defense, I had just discovered the Born to Run album in August of ’75, so I wasn’t paying attention to anything but Springsteen).
America Rock was a natural progression from what Schoolhouse Rock had been doing for the past several years, with one huge exception: math and grammar have solid, set-in-stone rules, while…
