How Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall” Is Still Relevant Today

The year is 1959. Pink Floyd’s future lyricist Roger Walters starts attending an English sixth form. His experiences there change his life and prompt him to write “Another Brick In The Wall”. In 2020, school still remains the same with no sign of change.

It’s the modern day. Students are bricks. They are the bricks that make up the wall, known as school to the population. Not human beings with emotions and desires, but just lifeless, invaluable bricks in a wall.

While school today may not be identical to how it was when Pink Floyd lyricist and bassist Roger Waters attended school – there is no longer corporal punishment, and students use more advanced technology, many aspects still remain the same.

In the psychedelic rock song, bricks are used as a metaphor for the students at the school, and the wall is a metaphor for the school itself.

The same as bricks in a wall, if something were to happen to one of the bricks, it could just be easily replaced without thought or sadness. If anything were to happen to a student in a school, a new student would just come along and fill in their space with no hesitation.

Additionally, similar to bricks, students are expected to be identical and without flaws, or they are deemed worthless. A school wants every single pupil to be a straight A’s, Grade 8 Music, club-attending mascot for their organization. Any student who isn’t – they are simply “thrown under the bus” and ignored entirely.

Pink Floyd guitarist, David Gilmour, didn’t benefit from this system either. While he attended a private and highly academic school, he took interest in rock music and guitar due to his parents prompting him rather than the school which he has stated his dislike for in the past.

In a time period where biased media and propaganda are so rampant, the phrase “we don’t need no thought control” remains relevant. Ideologies are discreetly trying to be pushed and certain beliefs are laughed at. Ideas different to those of authority are shut down.

Waters’ misuse of proper English grammar by his double negatives could well not be a mistake. It’s intentional and to spite the controlling environments that he once was in, showing them that they could not control how he truly was, even if they forced him to alter his outwards behaviour and mannerisms.

Still in the current day and age, the purpose of school isn’t truly to learn. It’s for the sake of perfect grades and making yourself appear successful to those around you. It’s less of a matter of if you actually learn or not as opposed to flawless marks.

It’s not a handful of difficult and entitled kids. It’s an entire generation that will determine the future.

When you type into Google Search “school makes me”, the list of results to come up include “depressed”, “stressed”, “exhausted” and even “suicidal”. There isn’t a single search on there that displays being content with the school system. That’s the depth of the situation.

There’s no plausible reason as to making children, who have no say over their life choices, suffer for a system that will only destroy their hope. They are forced to attend school, and ostracized when they do not comply with the rules set there.

There’s a reason why in the second verse, the band have a school choir sing the lyrics instead of them singing it individually. It’s a metaphor for the fact that it’s not the odd one or two kids who dislike the system, it’s the entire younger generation, hopeless for their childhood and future.

School Ignores The Individual Needs Of Pupils And Instead Tries To Fit Them All Into A “One Size Fits All” system – Only Causing Harm.

This also links into modern schools’ neglect and lack of care of students with mental difficulties and issues.

A student who doesn’t wish to comply to the restrictive rules of a school system and has different interests is considered a nuisance.

Several studies has shown that teenagers have different body clocks to that of an adult’s. They naturally prefer to stay up later and wake up later. Yet the majority of schools start at around 8:30 AM when many struggle to even wake up at that time.

This proves how willing school is to sacrifice your health, mental and physical, for the sake of production. If you fall ill, you are expected to catch up on all of your work immediately after you recover. There is no break from the constant work. Only stress and anxiety.

We live in a society that is addicted to work and productivity. Even one’s hobbies are expected to be productive, or else are deemed a “waste of time”. Where the desire for leisure and time-off went, it’s more important now than ever to bring it back.

The “education” system focuses on students remembering endless facts that may be of no use to them as opposed to truly learning.

One who takes no interest in mathematic formulas, Shakespeare’s works and theoretical physics but instead in video games, non-traditional art, or anything that does not fit the curriculum is an outcast to the system, and unhelpful to a school that wishes to have perfect grades.

These subjects should be introduced to students as some of them may take a genuine interest of them and may even choose to pursue a career centered around them. The aim isn’t to deny the interested students the choice to their subjects because they can definitely be useful.

However it’s important to note that while these subjects can be useful, they are not objectively useful to every single student. Chemistry is of no use to a student who plans on becoming a political commentator and the cases go on. Hundreds, thousands of hours wasted.

If a future politician had been studying political science instead of isotopes, the world could be changed. The possible progress that could be made not only to benefit the future of the students but also of the general population is drastic and painful to think about.

When a student wishes for certain thing that doesn’t fit in with the system, it has to be at their own expense.

Academic and high-performing schools, especially private scho0ls, often flaunt their high test scores and results. However, they never even mention the extreme stress, depression and anxiety caused by the pressure of performing well and over-work.

Since corporal punishment was criminalized in 1986, teachers haven’t been able to take out their unhappiness on students physically. Now, they simply resort to emotional and mental abuse. Manipulation, gaslighting, black-mailing, they’re all rampant in schools these days.

This is ultimately, however, to be expected in a capitalistic society. The purpose of the school in this system is not to educate children and encourage them to think for themselves. It’s to indoctrinate them into being mindless puppets of corporations who think only of money.

As a capitalistic society relies practically solely on profit and stocks, the wellbeing of the students are not deemed important unless this particular student is of value to the capital. Students are not just bricks, but bricks of money, merely notes.

Teachers, however, aren’t the only ones to blame for the abuse and unhappiness in classrooms and at schools.

The ones who are responsible for the broken school system are up to debate. As much as people criticize teachers, this averts attention away from the real problem: the social, political and economic system.

While things are certainly not identical globally, even in the West, the school system still breaks the teachers. Unless they manage to work themselves into a private school, they’re underpaid, not looked after enough, and ultimately are valued not because of their skills, but because they mean money.

There’s an alarming shortage of teachers in public schools in the U.K. — prompting schools to hire whoever is willing to apply, simply because they need anyone, and a bad teacher is preferable to no teacher in these circumstances.

And what this ends up in is an endless culture of unhappiness and bullying at schools. The constant unrest, the stress over exams and pay, I’ve been through it first-hand, as much as the school attempted to cover it up and distract me from the underlying issues that there were.

“I hated every second of it, apart from games. The regime at school was a very oppressive one … the same kids who are susceptible to bullying by other kids are also susceptible to bullying by the teachers.”

This is merely a short analysis of the Pink Floyd song and the issues with the current school system. Entire books could be written on just how broken sc

Just like how it was 60 years ago, students are still just another brick in the wall. It’s time to end the silence and for that to finally change.