Subversive tip – Watch Pink Floyd
Back in late 1979, Pink Floyd released The Wall, which included the song Another Brick in the Wall. Read on to watch the video and understand the message in this song.
You will notice that the video clip begins by panning over a dull urban environment with high rise council housing, where people are cut off from nature and from each other and then zooms into the school playground, with children chasing each other.
The teacher looms over the playground as a puppet and squeezes children into a meat grinder, extruding the individuals as a shapeless mass.
The phrase “another brick in the wall” again shows the loss of individuality. The line “All in all you’re just another brick in the wall” sums it up. The wall becomes an enclosing barrier with no way out for the trapped student.
The teacher (represented as a bug-eyed puppet) morphs into a hammer. The hammer metaphor is appropriate since it hammers down the nail that stands up, as well as crushing any dissent. Endless lines of hammers are shown goose-stepping like nazi soldiers (this is actually very clever).
The message is very subversive – against the system that crushes the individual. This often starts at school, with the education system used as part of the scheme to keep the masses powerless and in their place. Often this type of education encourages rote learning and mindless compliance and is of limited benefit other than producing a minimally educated expendable drone.
This is not to criticise all teachers – the teacher in this case represents those who use education to feed propaganda and use the school for personal power. The teacher is a puppet with an unseen puppet master pulling the strings.
Once we understand that the entire system is designed by the elite to stop ordinary people from ever getting ahead, we have the opportunity to exit from it.
Here are the words:
Another Brick in the Wall Part 2 (Waters)
We don’t need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
We don’t need no education
We dont need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave them kids alone
Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall.
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall.
“Wrong, Do it again!”
“If you don’t eat yer meat, you can’t have any pudding. How can you
have any pudding if you don’t eat yer meat?”
“You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddy!”
Tags: subversive, the system
January 25th, 2011 at 6:45 am
“All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall.”
I read this as the chorus of the industrial age. People are molded by educational systems to be interchangeable, in the same way as mass-produced machinery. Schools primary function becomes the sorting and ranking of students to determine their proper place within the economic engine. This sorting is compulsory–students who do not wish to participate are moved around from school to school or sent to detention homes. Those who earn the highest rankings are given scholarships and networking opportunities that can eventually be translated into comfortable, high-salaried employment. All this is done in the name of education. “Degrees = education” we are told, completely distorting the democratic ideal of “civic responsibility = education.”