Bringing Rock ‘n’ Roll to the Classroom

Steven Van Zandt, a member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, visited the Capitol Tuesday to promote his rock ‘n’ roll education curriculum with New Jersey Sens. Robert Menendez (D) and Frank Lautenberg (D). Van Zandt guest blogged with The Hill’s Congress Blog.

We stopped down to talk about a new thing we’re doing: our Rock ‘n’ Roll Forever Foundation is authorizing a rock ‘n’ roll curriculum to be presented to the school system. Probably it’s going to take about a year, but it will be finished around ’09 or so.

The Music Educators’ National Conference (MENC), which is really the only music teachers’ association, has endorsed us, which is very important; Scholastic is our partner, and we’re going to have the best writers in America — rock writers — write the history. It will live mostly on the web in full-length form, and then we have teacher partners who will take that and turn it into lesson plans.

Eventually, even though we call it Little Steven’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, it will be in every grade from preschool through college over the next four or five years. So it’s very important — the most important thing I’ve ever done. It’s a way of giving back what music has done for me, and I want to make sure the next generation and future generations get a chance to really hear and experience the best music ever made as far as I’m concerned, music from what was our renaissance period of the 1950s and 1960s, but also to understand the impact of rock ‘n’ roll on our culture and the fact that it’s a great common ground.

It’s the only art form ever half created by black people and half created by whites, with a healthy contribution by Hispanics, and women of course have been very involved as well as men. So there’s a lot of common ground to talk about, and I think we need that these days. We seem more segregated than we’ve ever been in some ways, oddly enough. I don’t know where things went wrong, but this is one way of providing, from a very young age, a common ground conversation that all different ethnic groups can take part in and be proud of in terms of their heritage.

So that’s the main goal. We also want to encourage people, of course, to take music classes wherever possible if that’s their inclination, but this is not just for musicians, it’s for everybody.

We certainly hope to then encourage music classes to be restored in every grade and for students to actually get it firsthand, experiencing music as a listener or as a player — either one. We’re beginning with the very early first step of establishing the history, getting people interested, having some fun in class again, and that will hopefully lead to more music appreciation at least, if not students actually taking part in music classes.