We're All Just Nicer Bricks Now

“We don’t need no education…”

There was a time when that line was uttered with the thrilling defiance of adolescent rebellion. It was vulgar, ungrammatical, and for precisely those reasons, electrifying to the young and mildly scandalous to their elders. To sing it was an act of rebellion, not against learning, but against the way it was imposed. Back then, the song was aimed squarely at the grey-suited disciplinarians, the rote-learned mantras of obedience, and the uniform rows of desks under fluorescent lights. 

Pink Floyd's Another Brick in the Wall was anti-institutional, anti-authoritarian, and anti-stagnation. Yes, it wanted to tear down the walls of the schoolhouse, but symbolically, it was already speaking of larger walls: between the self and its becoming, between spirit and system. The song, as it was heard then, was a hammer against the ossified, against the factory model of schooling that built citizens like assembly-line cars. 

But what if that hammer has now turned? What if the wall today is built not by conservative headmasters, but by progressive gatekeepers? What if the same song now indicts a different kind of schooling—one cloaked in empathy, but equally intolerant of dissent? The discipline once enforced with canes and sneers is now administered with smiles and slogans. The authoritarianism of the present is not dressed in tweed but in therapeutic jargon. It speaks not of order and obedience, but of inclusion, safety, and “lived experience.” Yet the effect, if anything, is more insidious. Where once the system demanded acquiescence to a rigid external order, now it requires internal assent to an ever-shifting moral consensus. 

In this sense, the song has aged unusually well. Another Brick in the Wall struck a chord because it suggested, however crudely, that the problem was not ignorance but coercion. One is no longer educated into the world, but socialized into a managerial ideology: risk-averse, self-policing, and above all, safe.

But the self, if it is to be anything worth salvaging, cannot be safe. It is unruly, unpredictable, capable of both cruelty and brilliance. It cannot thrive within the confines of bureaucratic virtue. The child knew this. He danced on tables. He drew dragons in the margins. He whispered subversion in the quietest moments. The child, if he was lucky, never believed he was a brick. The adult, however, is tempted.

At sixteen, the song felt obvious. It played through cheap speakers, the bassline thudding like a heartbeat of mutiny. The lyrics were anything but weak. They were battle cries—“Hey! Teacher! Leave them kids alone!”—and every adolescent in a repressive school system felt their spine straighten a little.

But fast forward. Now you're older. You read more widely. You've seen systems evolve. Gone are the canes and the condescension. In their place, we find something worse: the sincere. Sincerity, that most dangerous of virtues, now animates an entire class of would-be mind-shapers. Where once authority wore a frown and carried a stick, it now wears a rainbow lanyard and speaks of inclusion. But its appetite for obedience remains unchanged.

Now, the schooling doesn’t end when the school bell rings; it follows you in your feed, in your implicit bias training sessions, in your organisation’s DEI policies, in your movie suggestions that now come pre-curated with acceptable ideas. And suddenly, the line “We don’t need no thought control” sounds eerily fresh. Because thought control today wears a new face. It promises safety, inclusion, harmony—all at the cost of inquiry. Whether it comes in the form of nationalistic drills or mandatory pronoun declarations, the problem is the same: a forced consensus, a flattening of the individual, a refusal to let people think wrong thoughts on their way to right conclusions.

And so the song plays again. This time, you listen not as a student resenting authority, but as an adult noticing how every system, no matter how well-intentioned, eventually craves sameness. The song is not a mere teenage tantrum; it is prophecy. It foresaw that every generation will build its own wall and will believe it to be righteous.

Indeed, the most dangerous prisons are the ones that convince you you’re free.