The Brick in the Wall
In their song “Another Brick in the Wall”, Pink Floyd criticised the authoritarian school system that systematically produces perpetrators and victims.
They were slogans to bawl along to, ones that schoolchildren in the late 1970s were thrilled by: “We don’t need no education!”, “No dark sarcasm in the classroom!”, “Teachers, leave us kids alone!”.
An impressive feature film with animation elements showed the breaking-in of pupils within an inhuman system of enforced conformity. Every prohibition, every act of abuse, every broken soul is “just another brick in the wall”. Added to this were the singing of a children’s choir and an utterly impressive guitar solo.
The song still moves people today. Or rather: especially today. For rarely has the black pedagogy of the classroom taken on such brutal traits as it did during the Corona fear regime. The artist and singer Alexa Rodrian recalls the anti-authoritarian masterpiece.
Grey is my favourite “non-colour”: it is black and white – darkness and light. It is always a mixture of both, never just one thing, but mixed contrasts. In my eyes, upbringing – if one still uses that word at all – should be exactly like that. An attentive and nuanced accompanying of small human beings as they grow, one that, out of love, points out the boundaries that are vital to life: one’s own and those of others.
Old authoritarian structures that operate with violence, fear, transgression, pressure and shame should long since have become a thing of the past.
The way it appears to me is that the so-called fear-based pedagogy, still far too widespread, generally evokes two extremes: the perpetrators, who actively repeat what happened to them, and the victims, who passively endure, again and again, what happened to them.
The exceptions – namely the people who, because of the great weight of suffering, reject both for themselves and seek and walk new paths – here too only confirm, sadly, the rule.
In the late 1970s, the British musician and co-founder of the rock band Pink Floyd, Roger Waters, wrote the song “Another Brick in the Wall”; against England’s authoritarian school system and in memory of his own schooldays.
The repression and thought control of the sometimes extremely sadistic teachers at the English private schools “would do great harm to the children; one should leave the children in peace”, Waters said in an interview.
What is more, Pink, the protagonist of the album “The Wall”, is a torn and battered human being who cannot transform the early loss of his father in the war and his overly dominant mother into something good, but instead becomes a hate-filled perpetrator who pays back like with like.
That is how I understand the entire album “The Wall”, and the song “Another Brick in the Wall” in particular: as a clear plea against authoritarian structures, as a call to free thinking, free being and free action on equal terms – and thus as a great appeal for peace.
Listen & Watch
Audio version of this article
