While the song is not the first example of the antieducation theme in popular music, it came at a time when increasing numbers of students are questioning the value of their education. FULL ARTICLE by William Sievert
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/11453/another-brick-in-the-wall/
Another Brick in the Wall
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The wall was not necessarily anti- education. It was a revolt against the authoritarian ego’s of school TEACHERS. In fact popular music and rock and roll gave us an outlet to vent our frustrations. For me rock and roll was all about freedom of expression and freedom of thought…not just about naked disrepect for authority…As an American public school student in the 1980s I encountered many public school teachers who really didnt like their jobs and were just collecting “points” so they could retire with their fat pensions. A lot of them didnt really like children and had a lot of personal problems and took them out on us vulnerable kids. As Mark Twain said: ” I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
—Thank you
Good article. I remember some of the teachers complaining about the song in high school, but I had one teacher that supported it. He said that if we could ever find a factual error (it was for a history class) we would receive an A on the final exam.
No one ever found any factual errors, but it made us do research and dive into subjects further. No wonder why me made teacher of the year.
If you want a song to write about try: CW McCall – Convoy. It screams libertarian free business values vs. big government.
How to talk to “liberals†about state schools? Agree with their support for Church-State separation … and then ask why they don’t extend this support to School-State separation.
Also, agree with their opposition to tax-funded vouchers … and then again ask why they don’t extend this opposition to tax-funded public schools.
“All in all…it’s just another brick in the wall.” What Pink Floyd spoke out against is the conscious choice of society to cultivate independent thought. We now live in a world where we regurgitate the dogma espoused by celebrities, pop-culture politicians and biased media.
The world will snap out of it though. Humanity always returns to the path of liberty no matter how far they stray:-)
At school 20 years ago in New Zealand, our teachers made us sing it in music lessons. I’m not sure why, maybe it was their way of convincing us that school here “isn’t like that”.
Yeah, right.
Barry,
Leftists are simply inconsistent like that, and furthermore, they don’t care one whit about internal consistency. They are the “spoiled brat child” of capitalistic civilization, who have no concept of history, of the once-seemingly-unending misery their fathers brought them out of through capitalism, who “want it all” without realizing that, in the context of a human history of famine, disease, and war, and especially realizing that humans are just animals in nature, they really do have it all already.
Of course, they don’t think of themselves that way. Spoiled brats never think they’re spoiled brats; they just think they’re getting a “raw deal” or something, usually because they see someone who has more than they do. They’re great at rationalizing; they insist they are right by pointing out some academic paper or scientific theory that’s tangentially relevant to the issue at hand but inevitably does not address the whole picture, or they (usually unconsciously) distract attention from their lack of any clear logical foundation by obsessively searching for and vociferously pointing out hypocrisies or conflicts of interest in their enemies (ahemJonStewart).
And because they are so caught up in this mental masturbation in lieu of actual productive activity (which they hate because it “feels like work”), they consider themselves to be the “intellectuals”, at the forefront of civilizational progress. That the actual result of their proposals is the destruction of civilization does not occur to them; they have never bothered to think their ideas through to their logical conclusions.
The insidious doublethink that pervades the modern American left is staggering. It’s why I attack them much more than I do the right. The right does not usually try to hide their statism, nationalism, and general ignorance, but often widely proclaims it. They probably feel they need to be a parental figure to all the leftists out there, because, well, leftists REALLY need a strong parental figure in their lives. The right is right about that point at least.
It’s all a huge mess. Let’s find an undiscovered island and found our own country.
If you don’t eat your meat, you can’t have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?!
“We don’t need no education! We don’t need no thought control!”
Maybe some English lessons couldn’t hurt.
The government run schools are a an ongoing cancer in the United States. This whole argument could be avoided if we could get government out of the propaganda er education industry.
Excellent article and the days of “progressive” rock. Progressive, not in the political sense of “progressivism” which is nothing more than “con”-formity, but in the musical/artistic sense of creativity outside the typical “cookie cutter” mass production bubble gum pop music of the day. The music had so much to add not just in its art, but also in its message that was often quite critical of oppression, tyranny, and the like. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_rock and http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/essays/rush.htm
“in reviewing the record, Roger Waters is contending that in government-run schools, children are methodically tormented and humiliated by teachers whose comeuppance occurs when they go home at night and “their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives.”
We all had good teachers, bad teachers and sorry teachers. That´s a fact of life. The song in itself was more a protest against the system. You have to contextualize what the progressive rock movement was. Most of these groups were highly left-wing, so much of their protest gyrated around all of society. Education, although an important part of the system, was just the brunt of their attack. This was basically demographics. Young people form the market for these products, just like they´re the market for skate clothes, baggy jeans or rap music in the present. I´m not saying Waters was being dishonest when he wrote this song. I am saying that great part of the song´s success has to do with market appeal, and nothing else. There´s no question bureaucratized, government-provided, Napoleonic-derived education many times doesn´t captivate the imagination of young minds, but, first off, not all minds want to be captivated and second, the song doesn´t speak of education (learning) in a more ample day to day sense.
I would highly recommend the “School Sucks” podcast by Brett Veinotte. Excellent education on the “end of public education”. As depicted in Pink Floyd’s video, public school is nothing but a sausage factory of assembly line education where children are coerced into mass conformity, trained for a life in the factory.
I remember this being an issue all the way back in 1980 when i was in the 6th grade. There was talk of banning it back then in the US. What rubbish! Ban a song!? Anyway, I’ve always said the song has been mis-interpreted by educators and others. What the song is trying to illustrate is that if you don’t educate yourself (beyond public ed), and learn to think for yourself (critically), then you will just be a thoughtless moron – another brick in the wall. But the larger story of the album is about personal isolation and depression. So this is just one part of the whole story. Of course thought (public education) control and personal happiness are related.
LOL! Forgot to include the word ‘not’ in my sentence…” What Pink Floyd spoke out against is the conscious choice of society to “not” cultivate independent thought.
See how a statement falls apart without the inclusion of a key word…
This was a great song that reminded me of the multicultural education shoved down my throat both in high school and college. It was so strange for me taking diversity education classes in college while I was getting my masters in economics. I was interested in teaching and the College of Business allowed two classes out of the regular curriculum so I took advantage of it.
As the diversity education class was taught two things jumped out at me. First was the soda and cookies during class with very little study involved to pass the class. Quite a contrast from all the business students who were intense and extremely competitive. As I went from the 6th grade indoctrination of Multicultural Education to cut throat Public Finance and Fiscal Policy with all the MBA wonks beating each other up for a “A” I often wondered if I was attending the same university. It was surreal and quite informative. One group just chilling and complaining about white men (“lack of sensitivity towards diversity”) controlling education and another goal driven totally focused on learning and results.
The business classes never once mentioned race and no one cared who was in the class or what color or sex they were.
The diversity classes were all about race and “inclusion”. I remember them teaching about how alienated Indians were at the turn of the 20th century. The Indians felt alienated being taught English and European culture. As I was sitting there I thought that is exactly how I felt in government schools having diversity shoved down my throat. I just wanted to escape to my business classes where nobody cared about what color you were and past wrongs to this group or that group. In the business classes it was all about knowledge and how good you were. In the education classes your intellect mattered little. All that mattered is that you had a compassionate attitude and the right political view to teach students from different backgrounds.
I know from my experience if teachers just taught the subject and stopped all the brainwashing crap and everyone feeling sorry for this group or that group education would progress to being a honorable and worthy profession. Students would have more respect for teachers who didn’t give a rats behind who you were or what color you. Just teach and keep the baggage at the house.
This reminds me of some of my school days.
We had to ‘memorize’ the “Gettysburg Address”
what a waste of my memorization time… No mention was ever made of the Federal Reserve and Fractional Reserve Banking.
Yes.. feed them trash then there is no time for subjects of every day important things in life..
Art wrote:
“What the song is trying to illustrate is that if you don’t educate yourself (beyond public ed), and learn to think for yourself (critically), then you will just be a thoughtless moron – another brick in the wall”
A plausible reading, on the face of it. And also completely wrong, if you bother to actually listen to the album altogether. The “wall” is a wall that Pink is putting up around his own ego, to protect him from having to feel his own emotions. Anytime something or somebody hurts him emotionally (the death of his father in the war, his mother’s overprotectiveness, his teachers’ sadism, his wife’s faithlessness), that contributes to the building of that wall. Each such act becomes “just another brick in the wall”. At the end of the album, the wall comes down (i.e. he has a nervous breakdown).
The song is about the emotional trauma he experienced in school at the hands of sadistic teachers who “would hurt the children anyway they could; by pouring their derision upon anything we did; exposing any weakness however carefully hidden by the kids”. Sure Roger Waters was probably a leftie, but I think people are reading way too much into the song politically.
At the time the song came out education in America was still very conservative. It may have been less conservative than it was in the 50′s but it still was so. I assume it was the same in the UK. Those striking blows against the empire were likely lefties railing against the righty dominated institutions. Today it is more about righties railing against the left dominated “system”. At the end though, it is really always about the individual against tyranny. Libertarianism should be left nor right and should find some resonance in the song now AND then. An apt rock quotation that encompasses this? – “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Someone using Force to fill your head with garbage – it doesn’t really matter if it’s left or right. That’s almost semantics in the end. It’s about Force, physical and psychological.
An Education Revolution Is Being Demanded By Young People Especially.
Another Brick in the Wall!
There is not much that is independent about a brick. What is required of a brick is that all of the other bricks are of the same value. This is the exact opposite of education. True education is what enables an individual to mature and become an independent thinker.
The wall, composed of bricks, is a barrier. It ‘protects’ us from what is on the other side and it also keeps us from leaving. This is the definite intention of public education. It is designed to indoctrinate, to incorporate the propaganda of the State, and to have no or very, very few options to leave.
This is the exact opposite of education. True education is the fostering of truth-seeking in a manner that is unrestrained as the wind. The wind is not held back by any wall, in fact if it has to, it will blow the wall over!
In the United States the education system perpetuates the misinformation and propaganda of the unConstitutional coup. The funding crisis that is looming because the nation is bankrupt is caused by the economic terrorism of the unConstitutional coup. Educate yourself and others about that and then instead of bricks and walls we will have the breezes of liberty and justice moving in revolutionary patterns across the land.
Pink Floyd’s: Hey Teachers, Leave them Kids Alone !
Russ raises a very valid point for this article (and the uproar over the song): On the surface, ABITW2 seems to be an anti-education anthem, when in fact, the whole *sequence* of the first side of The Wall shows that the “bricks in the wall” are personal and applicable to the character Pink (partially biographic of Roger Waters).
Taking the official release, one must look at ABITW1 to see the beginnings of the “wall” being formed: Pink’s (Roger Waters’) father dying in WWII (esp. coupled with the b-side “When The Tigers Broke Free”) and ABITW3 where another “brick” is added due to psychiatric pressures (“I don’t need no drugs to calm me”) and infidelity of the character’s wife.
Even if one wanted to simply take ABITW2 by itself, you must still listen to “The Happiest Days in Our Lives” to get the context — Russ quotes “there were certain teachers who would hurt the children…” — while alone this could be seen as a catch-all statement against educators, a listen to the ROIO “The Wall Under Construction” (early demo recordings of the album) make it very clear that Waters was referring to influences in his personal past more-so than damning education in general:
THDOOL (demo) starts, “When we grew up and went to school there was A certain teacher who would hurt the children in any way HE could – by pouring HIS derision…” — a specific reference to a single teacher. Of course, it *sounds* a lot better to make lyrics more generalized and universal, and this is one of those cases.
The Wall is a personal album and really should be listened to in that light.
Thanks, Andew. Wow, you really know your Pink Floyd.
I think that even if “Pink”/Waters had gone to a privately funded school system, the songs would have been much the same. Waters was probably an emotionally troubled punk who was acting out by breaking every rule he could, including those that would rightly be applied to kids his age even in an ancap utopia. He may have had an actually sadistic teacher, or he might just have been resisting normal attempts to “socialize” him (and I don’t mean that in the socialist sense, but just in the sense of teaching him manners, etc.) So, to those who think the song has a deep political message, I say:
Wrong, Guess again!
Wrong, Guess again!
*grin*
The answer to this issue/problem is the same as the answer to so many other problems: get the government out of where it doesn’t belong, and put education back in the free market. Education is not the problem; the human mind and spirit love to learn and grow.
Do students in privately-owned and operated schools feel the same way about their “educational experience?” If not, why not? The problem is government regimentation and indoctrination as practiced in government-owned and operated schools.
The importance to the state of indoctrinating young people has been recognized for a long time; it goes back at least to Plato’s Republic. The importance to free minds and spirits of preventing government indoctrination of young people needs to be promoted.
Most people that I know who were subjected to “education” in government schools are incapable of thinking outside of the collectivist mindset. The idea that voluntary exchange rather than coercive relationships is the only just basis for society is something that never occurred to them. It is also beyond their ability to conceive of it as a real option.
Thomas McGovern wrote:
“The problem is government regimentation and indoctrination as practiced in government-owned and operated schools.”
Strangley, many private schools have more regimentation than the public ones do, and the parents and (some of) the students prefer it that way. As for indoctrination, that occurs in private schools, too, especially religious ones. Indoctrination is not even necessarily a bad thing. Teaching children that taking other peoples’ property is a form of indoctrination, too, after all.
No, the two problems with the public school system are 1) what it tends to indoctrinate students with; socialism, since the unions and politicos that control it tend to be socialists, and 2) it’s horribly inefficient at actually educating students, because there’s no competition to force economy.
Oops. I meant to type “Teaching children that taking other peoples’ property IS BAD is a form of indoctrination, too, after all.”
The modern equivalent of The Wall today, for me, would be “Fear of a Blank Planet” by Porcupine Tree.
Don’t try engaging me
The vaguest of shrugs
The prescription drugs
You’ll never find a person inside
Probably the greatest travesty in modern education is the pharmaceutical treatment of a child’s reaction to the nescient boredom of school.
Heaven forbid a kid has an actual personality and gets rowdy when he’s cooped up in a stuffy room all day fulfilling pointless tasks that will never benefit him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUnAxegUJu0
Having been a student in South Africa during this time, I can confirm that the government ban had almost no effect on the visibility of th esong, album and film, because in those days, the announcement of a ban on anything was the signal to rush out and buy it at all costs. if anything it boosted sales. Just about everyone of my acquaintance saw the film, bought the record ( or tape), and chanted the songs with relish. Didn’t stop them from subsequently graduating with assorted degrees, mostrly in politics, socialism, history and journalism though!
Yes, the bigger story was intended by Waters as an exposiition of personal alienation ( informed as much by the experience of his former bandmate Syd barret as by his own experience) . But the song itself was indeed a political comment, on the dehumanising nature of State education which had the effect of stamping out any individuality as soon as it surfaced. – and it still has, frankly. As shown in the film with its faceless cartoon children being fed on a converyor belt into a giant mincing machine. (Of course, Waters being something of a socialist ideologue himself, he saw the State education thing not as a a cancer emerging from Socialist Statism, but representative of the Thatcherite/capitalist fascism which was the fashionable bogeyman of the day . We Libertarians understand this nexus to be an erroneous figment of the socialist imagination).
And its undeniable that in the south African context, whatever the intention, the song’s release was timely and seized upon as an anthem of disaffection with the appalling State education system then in force ( I can confirm though that it is now no better).
INterestingly, the entire ‘The Wall’ had a later lease on life – some ten years later, Roger Waters ( Not Pink Floyd) enacted a live performance of th e show in Berlin, with an all-star cast, including Van Morrison, The Band, Steve Vie, Cindy Lauper and many others – to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall. And that gave the whole thing a new perspective – a story of individual alienation fused with the collapse of a brutally institutionalised society-wide alienation. ( and with a fresh song named ‘The tide is turning’ tacked on to the end, it was left with an upbeat coda wholly absent from the unrelenting gloom of th eoriginal). That show is well worth getting on DVD and cranking up th evolume with a big screen TV – if anything, I consider it a superior spectacle to th eoriginal film.
Mushindo, just to be a geek about it, “The Tide Is Turning” is a track from Roger Waters’ solo album “Radio KAOS” — which is actually well worth the listen, IMHO.
A libertarian website had a blog inviting its members to nominate their favorite libertarian songs. It was a good gig eliciting lots of responses. My own nominee: “Heaven is a Half Pipe,” by OPM, which my skateboarding grandson introduced me to. I liked it so much I’ve adopted the bands’ wordplay name in my personal anti-state vendetta, to wit: “OPM, sounds like opium, is equally addicting, stands for other people’s money.” Here ’tis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTYafNtr2v8
Here’s the lyrics to C.W. McCall’s “Convoy” that Jonathan mentioned:
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/c/cw+mccall/convoy_20026575.html
Of course the richest source of “rebel” music may come to us from the Irish, who suffered for 800 years or so under the Brit’s tyranny. A google search of “irish rebel songs” produces 217K returns. One of my many favorites: Brendan Behan’s brothers’ words and tune, “Patriot Game.”
Oh yeah. There are only two things wrong with education: mandatory attendance and mandatory funding (aka, taxes).
A song with a libertarian bent, one of my favorites-
“But the government Dole will rot your soul back there in your home town.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27ZiixkruCY
What this entry fails to realize is that the song is Rock N’ Roll. No matter how hard one tries to criticize the inherent messages of such music – it will always be a fruitless endeavor because that is the point.
to mikey: Thank you for that link. Good song!
Maybe what our students need is a little education. I was in school when that song first came out. I’m a Pink Floyd fan from 1974 onward.
Greetings U.S. Teachers:
Often when you are a teenager age you repeat things without understanding them. So let’s look at the context of Roger Waters et al at face value. We have post-war children who have grown up, formed a rock band named after two obscure southern United States, bluesmen: Pink Andersen and Floyd Council. They are British which means their experiential situation is different from my US school upbringing and not only that but they are at least 10 years my senior. Times may have been different. It is quite possible their schools were different from mine because not only is it in a foreign country with a government that used to be our enemy but also their entire country was under siege by my ancestors in the 30′s and 40′s. I will allow them to have room for feelings of inferiority, feelings of being threatened and controlled. When I considered all that as I first heard the song in college I allowed them to be angry especially since it was only drama like Superman is only pretending to be super.
This is a thought-provoking consideration of the effects that “Another Brick in the Wall” is having around the world. I actually just posted a feminist interpretation of The Wall at literatimom.weebly.com. Check it out! Of course, this is an especially timely topic since Roger Waters is reviving the album for a tour later this year.
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