An Interjection About Schoolhouse Rock

Someone I used to work with (and to some extent for) at Borders once admonished me to be careful about confusing coincidence and causality. In the 15 years since then, that's proven to be useful advice in looking at the world. Once you get beyond the micro level, it's tricky to isolate any single factor as the prime mover of events, let alone the direct cause. That said, it's hard to shake the idea that the rise of collective ignorance about the fundamentals of American history and government, not to mention "the three Rs", can be traced to a generation of kids who didn't have Schoolhouse Rock as a part of their Saturday morning routine.

On the one hand, I know that's silly. Kids learned about the government and the planets and the parts if a sentence long before Schoolhouse Rock and, so far as I can tell, still do. On top of that, it's unlikely that everyone of the target age watched ABC, something that's especially hard for me to fathom, because ABC had The Superfriends.

On the other hand, as the crackling of static in the media gets louder on issues especially in the political arena, I miss the sense of cultural unity it gave my generation. No matter what our views on religion or politics, songs like "I'm Just a Bill" helped ensure that we all had at least a certain baseline of common understanding about our country and our world.

Now, it's all too easy to live in an echo chamber where, not only can you avoid acknowledging any ideas that don't mesh with your own, you can also ignore inconvenient facts. The Obama/Kenya slanders and the so-called debates over Darwin's theory of evolution are just two examples of this. I don't claim for a second that the return of Schoolhouse Rock would cure this, especially since the attempted revival in the mid-90s didn't seem to help much, and I suspect certain circles will take issue with the scientific facts on display in "Interplanet Janet". At the same time, we should never underestimate the ability of a catchy song to bring us together.