who wrote what did you learn in school today
Tom Paxton Paxton's songs can be emotionally effective and cover a wide range of topics, from the serious and profound to the lighthearted and comical. "What Did You Learn in School Today?" mocks the way children are often taught nationalism and a subservience to authority. "Jimmy Newman" is the story of a dying soldier and "My Son John" is a song about a soldier who comes back home and cannot even begin to describe what he has been through. "Beau John" is a song derived from the Civil Rights Movement about taking a stand against racial injustice. "A Thousand Years" tells the tale of Neo-Nazi uprising, and "Train for Auschwitz" is about the Holocaust. "On the Road from Srebrenica" is about Bosnian Muslims who were killed in a 1995 massacre in Bosnia and Herzegovina. "The Bravest" is a song about the firefighters who died while trying to save others on September 11, 2001. Then there are Paxton's "short shelf life songs", which are topical songs about current events and things in the news. They include: "In Florida", about the 2000 election; "Without DeLay", a song about the former congressman; "Bobbitt", about John and Lorena Bobbitt; "Little Bitty Gun", which lampoons Nancy Reagan; "I'm Changing My Name to Chrysler", about the federal loan guarantee to Chrysler in 1979 (which was rewritten in 2008 as "I Am Changing My Name to Fannie Mae"[4] about the 700 billion dollar "bailout of the U.S. financial system"); "The Ballad of Spiro Agnew" (mocking the short career and the former-Vice President's resignation), and "Lyndon Johnson Told the Nation" (about the Vietnam War, which became "George W. Told the Nation"[5] in 2007 to lampoon the 2003 invasion of Iraq).