We Don’t Need No Thought Control

We Don’t Need No Thought Control — a catchy second line of Pink Floyd’s 1979 release of ‘The Wall’ became an instant hit, spanning multiple boundaries and reaching an audience that had never heard of the band before. The album’s popularity reached new heights with the release of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)” in the early 1980s, to the extent that numerous schools had to issue a ban on the song.

Roger Waters, the band’s lead bassist and lyricist, wrote the three-part song lyrics, expressing his personal experiences through the story of a character called Pink. The song captured not only the reality of educational institutions but also deep-seated human beliefs and the authoritative institutionalisation of individuals.

The song’s essence can be captured in “We Don’t Need No Thought Control,” which expresses rebellion against school education and its indoctrination and conformity to a rigid, predefined path of learning and knowledge. Such institutional indoctrination makes us just “another brick in the wall.” Many of these ideas echo Orwellian sentiment towards a system that constantly feeds you with what to think and feel.

In the book Pink Floyd and the Philosophy, George A. Reisch succinctly says: “It is not an attack on education per se.” It attacked certain teachers who torment their students with ridicule. It also attacks education when it becomes indistinguishable from ‘thought control.’ For instance, in history, the teacher becomes a tool for producing correct citizens who hold ‘right’ opinions and ‘patriotic’ beliefs and who do not question the status quo. In this context, Norman Douglas wrote: “Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.”

Modernity and Thought Control

With the “Birth of Modernity,” the school system introduced a particular form of mannerism. It taught the students ways to express the most profound human emotions. It developed a new standard of behaviour – where self-discipline over desires and emotions became a civilised form of conduct.

The Enlightenment project introduced the modern world to the pedagogy of learning, which established a uniform grading system, a specific doctrine of teaching and learning, merit-based evaluation, and standardised examinations. In the words of Dennis O’Keeffe, “Modernity is the combination of capitalism and democracy. Its economic core is based on property rights, which mobilise the organisation of resources. It also requires mass education to select intellectual talent for a complex division of labour.” As a result, our education system tends to produce individuals who are suited to benefit the capitalist structure. In the process, the school system indoctrinates us into what makes good and bad students.

All day long, the students do nothing but follow instructions – solve so-and-so questions, add these numbers, multiply the others, complete their homework, and refrain from talking. The industrial-age mentality of mass production and mass control is deep-seated in our school system. At schools, one is rewarded for doing exactly as one is taught.

As children, our aspirations are often shaped to fit into a system our society deems us suitable for. In the process, a child is taught to learn the alphabet as A-for-Apple, B-for-Ball, and C-for-Cat, rather than A-for-Apple, B-for-Big Apple, and C-for-Custard Apple, for an Apple-loving child.

The creativity of a child is suppressed in such an education system. The students have become products in a factory, with labels of good and bad products, that are evaluated by a standard grading system.

Critique of Modern-Day Thought Control

In his work, The One World Schoolhouse, Sal Khan refers to a phenomenon known as “Swiss-cheese gaps.” We are taught multiple subjects during our prime school years and often fail to learn them in an inquisitive manner. When a child is taught multiple subjects at school, they might show a greater interest in one particular subject than in others. Since the evaluation is based on a minimum score required to pass, the student may only learn things in bits and pieces.

The students have been constantly pushed ahead regardless of their mastery of a topic. When this process continues for several years, all the knowledge a student might have acquired becomes largely irrelevant. Examinations – a mechanism that evaluates what is written, how it is written, and how not to write something – are legitimate forms of education and their values.

The education system, based on imitation and rote learning, where students stay up all night to memorise useless facts that are forgotten the next day, and evaluates children based on their test scores, is an inhumane exercise. Thus, some children are labelled ignorant, and others are considered intelligent.

We are all a product of such a system. A system that judges a fish by its ability to climb a mountain. It rigidly curtails one’s interests and ability to think critically and proposes a pre-defined path that most likely results in ‘another brick in the wall.’

Our society is changing rapidly, but our education system has remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years. It is mired by an industrial-age mentality of churning out factory workers. However, we live in an Information Age. Our education system must also be tailored to meet the individual needs and interests of students in the era of rapid, unabated information flow.

In the years that follow, there is a need for a digitised, automated, interactive and individual-centric education at the learner’s pace. There must be increased encouragement towards peer-to-peer learning in the school system. Ceteris paribus, we don’t need any education to control our thoughts.

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Cover Photo: MsSaraKelly, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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