In one-room schoolhouses, kids learned their 3 Rs and geography, they read their Shakespeare and learned Newton's Laws of Motion, they studied the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They learned about the how the weather worked (very important in farming communities) and the motion of the stars throughout the year. This was a time when farm boys really did read Milton's "Paradise Lost" while plowing the fields.

They didn't teach creationism because that is a relatively recent invention—early 20th century. I do have a geology book from 1864 that teaches the formation of the earth from the times of Noah but does not teach anything about Noah but merely from the time period that biblical scholars generally agreed that Noah would have lived in. In this way, kids got a good scientific education without looking anti-religious in communities where going to church on Sunday was more or less mandatory.

Only when public schools became a norm across the nation did creationism rear its head. Only when students and the parents had become so abysmally dull could something as silly as creationism/intelligent design be seriously suggested as fit for any school's curricula, to be taught alongside evolution (which, by the way, has nothing to do with how the earth was created or how life was formed—only how life forms changed and adapted over generations due to environmental and geographical circumstances).

Oddly, Catholic schools teach evolution and yet are left alone by rabid creationists. Religious schools are free to teach as many non-religious classes as they please while public schools are under pressure to teach religious dogma that never could have cut muster in a one-room schoolhouse.

After the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in 1925, creationists had a major influence on what was allowed to be put into schools' science texts and this went on until 1957, when America suddenly found itself watching a Soviet satellite launched into earth orbit. Suddenly, the pious stranglehold held on science by the creationists which the government did not see fit to interfere with was now quickly and irrevocably broken by that same government lest the Soviets get too far ahead of the U.S. in the space race. But by that time, television had already taken over as the chosen form of public discourse.

Television is an entertainment gimmick. Its very format is for entertainment and not education. Educational TV is an oxymoron just as "learning is fun." Learning is not fun and it shouldn't be fun. Learning is work. Kids need to know there's a time for work and a time for play and the two must not be confused. To learn something, one needs to buckle down and study and not be trying to have fun. Learn first, have fun later.

The reason we churned out great scholars as Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton was because these men received a rigid schooling where study was study. Reading was required and lots of it. We churned out great composers as Mozart and Bach because these men received a rigid musical training we can scarcely conceive of today. Perhaps