and Words
We don’t need no education
We don’t need no thought control
No dark sarcasm in the classroom
Teachers leave the kids alone
Hey, teacher leave the kids alone!
All in all it’s just another brick in the wall
All in all you’re just another brick in the wall
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
On an otherwise ordinary school day, we gathered at the cafeteria in my middle school, Parkway Middle School. Teachers and administrators shuffled the student body in an orderly manner into the large room. Long tables normally used as our lunch tables filled the room. The tops of each table pivoted to a makeshift bench; between the tables and the lunch chairs, they’re all aligned to face the same direction. We gathered to what appears to be a student talent show.
Honestly, it was mostly a forgettable talent show. I have forgotten most of the acts except for one, this one. A small collection of students sang this particular song. The sheer intentional irony of their singing, “We don’t need no education.” on school grounds was memorable. However, what permanently seared it into my memory was the subsequent administrator who upon getting the microphone asserted that you do need education… only to have the students in the audience laugh her off the stage.
Having the technology of the 1980’s, we had two choices for media: cassette or radio. Tapes cost money, so we often slummed it with the radio. Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. 2” filled the airwaves on the radio for a while. As we rode in in the car, my sister navigated the radio. First, she would jump between the preset stations on the stereo. Then upon landing on a song to her liking, we would play the remainder of said song. This tune is one that would play endlessly over those speakers. We may occasionally hear it consecutively over two different stations. This song defined pockets of my youth.
These words and music circled my mind during those years. Having moved from San Juan, Puerto Rico a few years before, I still didn’t have a full grasp of the English language. Similarly, I first encountered this tune when I attended middle school. I simply didn’t have a full understanding of the meaning of the words. Was it a statement about teenage rebellion? Was it indeed just a simple call for truancy? For years, I carried this impression in my head.
Of course, there were also the dark undertones of just the music. I don’t believe that I ever got this album on tape, so any recording I got of it was recorded off the radio. This was something that was fairly easy to do with a boombox, another musical artifact that modern teens will not recognize. I walked as I listened to it on headphones. Each step synchronized with the bassline. In fact, I strutted; I felt like a badass. Any distraction in school was disallowed, and thus headphones and Walkmen were among those items. Still many days I carried this contraband into school, risking its confiscation. “Another Brick in the Wall” was my little piece of rebellion.
I spent freshman year in high school almost intentionally trying to fail; I spent more energy ditching school than attending. While I could certainly communicate in English, I was still socially awkward. Many classmates had written me off in high school, telling me I would amount to nothing in hushed tones that the teachers could not hear. In fact, they even left anonymous notes in the pocket of my jacket or my bag as persistent reminders of that. Though by the time I got to high school, it was no longer about physical intimidation, it was now about maximizing humiliation.
I abruptly course corrected immediately after that grade and became an exceptional student. Honestly, I can’t definitively tell you entirely why I made such an abrupt change in my studies, but I just did. I think revenge had something to do with it. It was not in the ‘plotting to harm you’ sense, but instead in the ‘just watch how successful I become to spite you’ sense. I won’t tell you that I became a state championship athlete or the epitome of popularity, but I excelled at what I did. Through discipline and dedication, I became a force to be reckoned with.
Perhaps through karmic irony, in rebellion against the establishment, in this case of popularity and peer pressure, I did need education. It was my escape.
Pink Floyd: The Wall was not a movie that I remembered released in theaters. I first watched portions of it years later, on what may have been a late night MTV broadcast. To be bluntly honest, it seemed like sheer madness and led me to like the music a little less. However, I did discover that the music was considerably more nuanced and complex that my pre-teen mind originally anticipated. I filed it away as simply that; perhaps making a mental note to ponder about it later.
And thus, here I am. Was it all about a plea to resist conformity and peer pressure? The song starts with a forceful assertion against education and ‘thoughts controlled’. What about that ‘dark sarcasm in the classroom’? Are we literally talking about classrooms and teachers? Or is it symbolic of society as a whole? And yet in his efforts to resist, he eventually surrenders to simply being ‘another brick in the wall’. Though one is left to wonder… Are the bricks in the wall, uniform and undistinguishable from each other? Or are they like small pictures of a photomosaic or a mural, each distinctly different but part of a cohesive whole?
Independent of this song, I have led my life persistently resisting conformity. It is a force so engrained in me that, to this day, I simply cannot root for any local sports team. It meant that I was an outsider more often than not and that I simply wouldn’t accept any protocol for how I should behave. Therefore, I struggled to find my moral compass on a large array of situations, but at very least I understood that it was my moral compass, and not one that I inherited from my ‘community’ out of sheer laziness.
Though maybe I’m overthinking it all. Maybe they’re just fragmented slivers of cohesive sentences from the mind of a mad man. Though one thing is for sure, I choose to have my figurative pudding whenever I want.