I loved “Schoolhouse Rock,” as did most kids of my generation.

Sadly, George Newall, the last surviving member of the team who created it, has passed away.

Millions of kids learned basic concepts such as math, grammar, the parts of language, and other concepts from the videos dreamt up by Newell and his partner in crime David McCall.

The series was born out of McCall’s frustration with his kids’ poor education. Even in the 1970s public education had declined to the point that literate folks like McCall, an advertising executive, was looking for ways to get his kids interested in learning.

The children’s series — which ran from 1973 to 1984 before being revived in the 1990s — set math, civics, science and grammar lessons to music.

The idea stemmed from a conversation Newall, then a creative director at the McCaffrey & McCall advertising agency, had with agency president David McCall in which McCall expressed frustration that his young sons couldn’t multiply, “but they can sing along with Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.”

“I asked Ben, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, my partner, Bob Dorough — he can put anything to music!’ ” Newall told the New York Times Magazine in 2018.

“He told me Bob had written a song based on the words on the mattress tag that say, ‘Do not remove under penalty of law,’ ” Newall recalled. “So I brought Bob in, and David gave him the assignment. He came back about two weeks later with ‘Three Is a Magic Number,’ and we were all knocked out by it.”

That tune taught kids about tripods, triangles and counting by threes. Multiplication inspired a number of memorable ditties. Other fan favorites include “Interjection!,” “Unpack Your Adjectives” and “The Preamble” to the US Constitution.

Tom Yohe — the agency’s art director and a cartoonist — illustrated the group’s ideas, and the show was sold to ABC. Yohe died in 2000, and Dorough passed in 2018.

Schoolhouse Rock was a rockin’ success. Just the other day I was chatting with a friend and the series came up unprompted. We had both learned about the Constitution from Schoolhouse Rock, long before it came up in a classroom. We learned about verbs, adjectives, conjunctions, and bits of history as well.

One of my favorites was a piece on the Preamble to the Constitution. It formed a foundation for all the civics I learned in the years after, and  would probably be attacked by the New York Times as among the most destructive propaganda in world history. Nikole Hannah-Jones would have hated it.

One of the most memorable was the video “I’m just a Bill” that took kids through how a Bill becomes a law. It was memorable enough that it has come up in discussions with fellow politicos lots of times. It really is something when educational TV can persist in memory for decades.

I got my dose of Schoolhouse Rock as every Gen Xer did (I was born in 1964, which I think of as early Gen X, although it is often portrayed as the last year of the Boomers), with my Saturday morning cartoons. Many of those cartoons were educational as well. How many kids got their first taste of classical music with a dose of Bugs Bunny? Violence and Classical music are a great combo.

It was an age with fewer superheroes, and the ones who were favorites were wholesome as well. Saturday mornings were the opposite of subversive. They were entertaining, funny, and filled with subterranean moral lessons that turned Gen X into one of the most responsible generations since World War II. Skeptical of the powerful, yes, but also self-reliant and responsible.

Unsurprisingly, it is Generation X voters who are the most Republican. I attribute at least part of responsibility for that to the simpler messages of Schoolhouse Rock and the simpler values we absorbed every Saturday morning. We were the Reagan generation; aware of government’s limitations, but fundamentally believing in American values.

Gen X, the most reactionary generation pic.twitter.com/XkLLqj0up1

— Aryeh Cohen-Wade (@AryehCW) October 17, 2022

The passing of Newall is a sad reminder of those simpler times. And, before the Left attacks me for longing for a time when White Supremacy ruled the land, watch this video on the role of verbs in the language. Most of the characters are black in a mixed race cast. We learned in the Civil Rights era all about the evils of discrimination. Heck, I watched the Mod Squad!

Schoolhouse Rock helped shape a generation, and with its passing in the 1980s (It was revived later in the 1990s) an all-too-short era passed with it. Now Newall, the last of the creative team, has passed as well.

I don’t think it is an accident that a frustrated advertising duo originated the idea. Their profession was at its height during the era as well. American capitalism was going through a rough patch, but their social values were rooted in a simpler time as well. A time when capitalism was advancing human well-being at a dizzying pace, while the culture that undergirded it was facing a daunting and eventually crippling crisis.

Under Reagan capitalism revived, but the cultural rot had already begun to undermine basic American values. You can find the roots of Balenciaga’s corruption and Canada’s Simon’s department store’s embrace of nihilism in the 1960s and 1970s. Capitalism survived, but our culture has not.

Unsurprisingly Disney now owns the rights to the series. Sad. What an ignominious end to something truly great. In today’s world Schoolhouse Rock would be about using Butt Plugs.

I am sad to see that one of the last great children’s educators has passed. His era passed long ago, but with his death comes a reminder of a better time.