Steven Van Zandt Creates a Free School of Rock: 100+ Free Lesson Plans That Educate Kids Through Music

When I think of rock ‘n’ roll high school, I think of the Ramones, but in the 1979 Roger Cor­man film no one real­ly learns much. In real­i­ty, how­ev­er, anoth­er leg­endary musi­cian, still going strong after five decades in the busi­ness, has put his cred to seri­ous use, lever­ag­ing star­dom as a musi­cian and actor to cre­ate a music cur­ricu­lum teach­ers can use for free, with lessons on rock his­to­ry, Native Amer­i­can pol­i­tics, Bob Dylan’s poet­ry, immi­gra­tion and the blues, civ­il dis­obe­di­ence, the fight to end Apartheid, and much more. That man is Steven Van Zandt—aka Lit­tle Steven of the E Street Band, or Sil­vio Dante of The Sopra­nos, or Frank Tagliano of Lily­ham­mer, or a few oth­er alias­es and fic­tion­al char­ac­ters.

“For the past decade,” writes John Seabrook at The New York­er, the ban­dana-clad gui­tarist has been “work­ing on a way to recre­ate” a “dynam­ic, out-of-school learn­ing expe­ri­ence inside class­rooms, through his Rock and Roll For­ev­er Foun­da­tion.” Work­ing, that is, to recre­ate his own expe­ri­ence as a dis­af­fect­ed youth who “had no inter­est in school what­so­ev­er,” he recalls. What inter­est­ed him was music: the Bea­t­les, at first, but as he learned more about them, he picked up “bits of infor­ma­tion” about East­ern reli­gion and orches­tra­tion. He learned about lit­er­a­ture from Dylan.

“You didn’t get into it to learn things,” he says, “but you learn things any­way.” At least if you’re as curi­ous and open-mind­ed as Van Zandt, who came to val­ue edu­ca­tion through his non-tra­di­tion­al course. Over ten years ago, when the Nation­al Asso­ci­a­tion for Music Edu­ca­tion told him that “No Child Left Behind leg­is­la­tion was real­ly dev­as­tat­ing art class­es,” he con­front­ed Ted Kennedy and Mitch McConnell, telling them, “did you ever hear that every kid who takes music class does bet­ter in math and sci­ence?” They apol­o­gized,” he says, “but they said they weren’t going to fix it.”

So Van Zandt decid­ed to do it him­self with a pro­gram called TeachRock. Work­ing with two eth­no­mu­si­col­o­gists, he built the cur­ricu­lum to con­nect with kids through music. “Instead of telling the kid, ‘Take the iPod out of your ears,’” he told a crowd of teach­ers gath­ered at Times Square’s Playsta­tion The­ater in May, “we ask them, ‘What are you lis­ten­ing to?’” Van Zandt calls his cur­ricu­lum “teach­ing in the present tense,” and while his own back cat­a­log may not nec­es­sar­i­ly be stream­ing on kids’ cur­rent playlists, he incor­po­rates not only his music and the fifties and six­ties rock ‘n’ roll he loves, but also hip-hop, pop, punk, and the “Latin rhythms of ‘Despaci­to.’” He even uses Beyoncé’s “Sin­gle Ladies” video to prompt a dis­cus­sion on the slave trade.

The focus on pop­u­lar music as a force for change is ful­ly in keep­ing with Van Zandt’s own path. His self-edu­ca­tion led him into activism in the 80s when he wrote and record­ed “Sun City” with 50 oth­er artists to protest South African Apartheid. Unlike some oth­er ben­e­fit songs of the time (like the cringe-induc­ing “Do They Know It’s Christ­mas”), “Sun City,” with its accom­pa­ny­ing video (above), took effec­tive polit­i­cal action—a blan­ket boy­cott of the Sun City resort—and didn’t sug­ar-coat the issues one bit (“relo­ca­tion to pho­ny homelands/separation of fam­i­lies, I can’t under­stand”). The Sun City boy­cott gets its own mod­ule.

As Van Zandt told Fast Com­pa­ny in 2015, “I had been research­ing Amer­i­can for­eign pol­i­cy post-World War II just to edu­cate myself, which I had nev­er done, being obsessed with rock ‘n’ roll my whole life. I was quite shocked to find that we were not always the good guys.” His dis­cov­er­ies com­pelled him to vis­it South Africa and to “ded­i­cate my five-record solo career to that learn­ing process, and also com­bine a bit of jour­nal­ism with the rock art form.” That same pas­sion for jus­tice informs all of the TeachRock lessons, which you can browse and down­load for free at the TeachRock site. The mul­ti-media units incor­po­rate video, audio, images, activ­i­ties, infor­ma­tive hand­outs, and oth­er resources.

Each les­son also explains how its objec­tives meet Com­mon Core State Stan­dards (or the state stan­dards of New Jer­sey and Texas). “TeachRock is root­ed in a teach­ing phi­los­o­phy that believes stu­dents learn best when they tru­ly con­nect with the mate­r­i­al to which they’re intro­duced,” notes the site’s “Wel­come Teach­ers” page. “Obvi­ous­ly, pop­u­lar music is one such point of con­nec­tion.” Per­haps not every kid who learns through music as Van Zandt did will go out and try to change the world, but they’re more than like­ly to stay engaged and stay in school. And that’s exact­ly what he hopes to accom­plish.

“Teach­ing kids some­thing they’re not inter­est­ed in,” he told the teach­ers in New York, “it didn’t work then, and it’s even worse now. We have an epi­dem­ic dropout rate.” Then, in his refresh­ing­ly hon­est way, he con­clud­ed, “Where are we going to be in twen­ty years? How are we going to get smarter look­ing at this Admin­is­tra­tion? You know, we’re just get­ting stu­pid­er.” Not if Lit­tle Steven has any­thing to say about it. He’s cur­rent­ly on tour with his Dis­ci­ples of Soul, and offer­ing free tick­ets to teach­ers, pro­vid­ed they show up ear­ly for a TeachRock work­shop. Sign up here!

For more, check out Steve’s new mem­oir, Unre­quit­ed Infat­u­a­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cheap Trick’s Bassist Tom Peters­son Help Kids With Autism Learn Lan­guage With Rock ‘n’ Roll: Dis­cov­er “Rock Your Speech”

David Byrne & Neil deGrasse Tyson Explain the Impor­tance of an Arts Edu­ca­tion (and How It Strength­ens Sci­ence & Civ­i­liza­tion)

New Research Shows How Music Lessons Dur­ing Child­hood Ben­e­fit the Brain for a Life­time

The Con­cept of Musi­cal Har­mo­ny Explained in Five Lev­els of Dif­fi­cul­ty, Start­ing with a Child & End­ing with Her­bie Han­cock

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness