Another Brick in the Wall — A philosophical thought

Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’ is more than a cult classic music. It spanned boundaries and reached audience who never heard his name before. The song became so popular among students of that era that some schools had to ban from playing the song.
Released in 1979 the song captures not just the reality of educational institutions but also deep lying philosophy of human mind.
Listening to the song today morning reminded me of a line I read two decades back, “I was born intelligent, education ruined me”. I have pondered over this question ever since, debating to and for with myself. I will be my own devil’s advocate that would force myself to unwanted conclusion, only to challenge them later. My mind was messed up until today.
I haven’t come to a conclusion, cause there is nothing. We need education, but not in the current format. The reason is that our brains are not wired for the information overload we receive day in day out. Worse, examinations that are just one of the ways to measure the ability of a student is made to be the most important measure.
Forget exams, that’s a topic for another day. About information overload, we are not wired to take as download. We are not machines but that’s how we are treated as. While Pedagogy and Andragogy theories are abound, pedagogy like the way it’s taught is killing human mind. Pedagogy is the method used to train children while Andragogy is the method used to train Adults. The difference is that Adults will like to include their experience while learning unlike children.
While the argument is true, it’s also true that Children don’t retain information as expected. They tend to forget or not even pay attention during the class. Who can blame them? Haven’t we all sat inside a wall listening to countless hours of monologue? It’s true. We have become another brick in the wall.
Not just in terms of the inability to process of information in one shot, but also in terms of the strict code of education that has to be followed. Be this way, do things this way, nothing else is wright, what we teach you is the ultimate education and blah blah. The way human brains are being conditioned right from childhood is brilliantly captured in the video.
‘Brick in the wall’ — Let that sink in for few moments. We have truly become a brick. We are stuck. As children our aspirations and dreams have been quashed and destroyed so that we can become a brick. We in turn, without our own knowledge, are doing the same to our kids. In our desire to make our kids successful (whatever that means), we are driving them to become an elite brick. The brick that sits on top, hoping that will make all the difference.
It’s not just in the education sector we are making ‘brick’ children, around us, society and politics, everyone is becoming a ‘brick’. Succumbing to age old traditions and thoughts. Blocking ideas and ideologies. While we celebrate successful humans and their achievements, they are so few that we conclude humans have moved beyond being bricks in the wall.
Why haven’t we moved from the mentality, the herd mentality. In an age where there are countless of motivational videos, books, thoughts, articles and stuff, where are we going wrong?
Human Beings are confirmation biasists. We want to be acknowledged by the society, by public, by our friends and family. The only way to achieve is to do what people think is the norm. And what is the norm? Doing things that was done for hundreds of years.
Interestingly what we have also done is convince ourselves that what we do is not what others do. We think ourselves as different. Are we, truly different? Don’t we wake up and go to office like everyone else. Eat at the same restaurant, have the same food, drinks, meet like minded people? How different are we? What makes us think that we are not another ‘brick in the wall’?
How can we be ‘different’ when we have come through an education system that is designed to produce ‘Bricks’? It requires tremendous amount of thinking and planning to realize that we are in a maze, stuck in our thoughts, which makes us believe that we are in the right direction.
Can we move to become something else? May be. We need to deconstruct the wall.
