Back when I was a kid, back before Al Gore had invented the Internet or anyone had ever heard of blogs, Facebook, or YoutTube, most American kids would get up early on Saturday morning to watch cartoons on the three major television networks. The purpose of these cartoons was to get us to sit quietly in front of the television screen learning all about the latest sugar coated breakfast cereal (this was back before government farm subsidies made it cheaper to us corn syrup instead instead of sugar) or toy that we would all dutifully ask our parents to buy once they woke up. The trick, of course, was for us not to wake our parent up too early, since if we woke our parents up too early on Saturday morning they would be much less likely to buy for us the products advertised that morning regardless of whether added to our requests a “pretty please with sugar on top” (note how terrible it would sound to plead “pretty please with corn syrup on top”).
There was, though, one network that opted to include a little educational content into the morning mix of cartoons and capitalism, ABC. Starting in 1973, the network ran a series of short cartoons called Schoolhouse Rock! Here’s one of my favorites:
It’s been almost 35 years since I first saw that cartoon and I probably happily watched it several hundreds times between 1975 when it first came out and whenever my pubescent body decided that it prefered sleep to cartoons on Saturday mornings. This morning when one of my colleagues at work asked me about about the Federlist Papers and somehow our conversation wandered to the Simpsons’ parody of this video. My colleague who grew up in Argentina, have never seen the original video, only the parody, so we watched the original on YouTube (Fox Television had YouTube remove the video of the parody-a foolish inconsistency if you ask me).
As I sang along with the video, the words coming back to me as as soon as the video started to play. That got me to thinking. Though the videos were called “Schoolhouse Rocks!” the reason I watched it was not because I saw it in school or because it was a homework assignment. The cynic might say that I watched these videos hundreds of time simply because we didn’t have cable back then, and if I had cable I probably would have switched the channel, but I doubt it. All we had was a small black and white television (I realized watching the video today that this was the first time I saw it in color), but I would sit in front of it (despite my mother’s constantly warnings me that I’d go for donig that), with my hand on the channel knob rotating it the minute I got bored with whatever I was watching (despite my mother’s constantly warning me that I’d break the television doing that). For whatever reasons, I was content to watch Schoolhouse Rock! videos over and over again, the same way on Sunday mornings I’d watch Abbott and Costello movies over and over again (I can still recite Who’s on First from memory).
I ended up taking a liking to politics and studied it in college and graduate school, but as I watched “I’m Only a Bill” this morning I tried to remember any of my teachers over the years teaching me how a bill became a law. I must have sat through hundreds of hours of “civics” in grammar school and been taught the content of that cartoon at least a few dozen times, but I can only remember the cartoon. I’m also sure that it was because of Schoolhouse Rock! that the Preamble to the Constitution is ingrained in my memory: I can only recite it to the tune of the Schoolhouse Rock! song “Preamble.”
When I went to add the DVD’s for Schoolhouse Rock! to my Amazon Associate’s store, I happy to see that they produce interactive DVD’s of the series for use inside the classroom. I wonder, though, whether these three minute videos presented to today’s children in a classroom setting as they did for millions of American kids when they were presented in their living rooms hundreds of times a year. I can’t remember a single grammar school class in which I was taught how a bill becomes a law in the United States, would I be able to if one of those lessons was taught in conjunction with the showing of “Im only a Bill”? I doubt it. VCRs were not common when I was in grammar school; multimedia lesson plans at that time were built around 35mm filmstrips accompanied by records or, in later years, cassette tapes. The teacher’s pet would be put in charge of manually moving the filmstrip from frame to frame when the instructed when the soundtrack beeped to indicate it was time to advance by a frame. It was a big deal when the teacher would show a short movie in the classroom. I recall these movies and filmstrips being a nice break from the monotony of most grammar school lessons, but I can’t say I remember the content of a single one of them. I remember Schoolhouse Rock! precisely because it was not a part of my formal education process. I am sure at some point I was assigned a couple of pages to read about the process of how a bill became a law and that I dutifully skimmed it. I may even have reviewed it a second or third time in preparation for a test, but I would never have read it a couple of hundred times. I’m sure I must have sat contendedly in front of my television watching Schoolhouse Rock! episodes and that this had a lot to do with my knowing how a bill become a law in the United States and I know the way conjunctions function, in part, because I watch “Conjunction Junction” a few hundred times as well. I’m also sure I’m not alone. When I went to get the link to “Conjunction Junction” I noticed that it’s been viewed of a million times on YouTube.
Of course, Schoolhouse Rock! could never replace formal classroom education. There’s no replacing a good teacher. I may not remember individual lessons, but I have very fond memories of my grammar schools teachers, even the nun who taught me the painful lesson that rosary beeds, besides a symbol of devotion, are very effectively tools of corporal punishment. What education needs first and foremost is good teachers, but we also need to look at the enormous potential that the media brings to educate through nonformal means. Schoolhouses rock, but complimenting formal with nonformal education through new media is critically important education tool. The Internet and new media are the ultimate open educational resources, but it is important to recognzie them as compliments and not substitutes for formal education.
The Internet and new media brings new opportunities and new challenges to nonformal education. It is unlikely, for instance, that Schoolhouse Rock! if it were released on YouTube would have the affect on the current generation of grammar school kids as it did when ABS release it for the generation that eventually came to be known as Generation X. It’s been Generation X, I am relativiely certain, and not today’s grammar schools kids who have watched “Conjunction Junction” on YouTube. Maybe if Nickolodean started airing a series like Schoolhouse Rock! the series might have an impact that ABC programming would be likely to have, since that’s where you might find the captivated audience of children that the major network once enjoyed on Saturday mornings. What helped Schoolhouse Rock! have an impact was that it was shown repeatedly over a long period of time. YouTube videos are watched repeateldy, but their shelf life is shorter: today’s most popular videos will shortly become yesterday’s news. It will be intriguing to see if in thirty-five years whether there will be a shared collective memories of learning how a bill became a law or how conjuctions function.
Recent Comments