Do we need another 'Schoolhouse Rock'? Celebrating 50 years of the educational songs

“Schoolhouse Rock” premiered on television 50 years ago. The series taught a generation about math, grammar, history and civics, including how a bill becomes a law. The three-minute animated songs appeared in the 1970s between Saturday morning cartoons.

An advertising executive developed the idea for the series when he found his son struggling with memorizing multiplication tables for his math homework, but had no problem memorizing lyrics to popular rock songs.

“He picked up on this idea that maybe music was the way to go to teach him the math he wasn’t getting,” says Paul Ringel, history professor at High Point University in North Carolina who has been writing about the history of "Schoolhouse Rock."