Pink Floyd on Education

We don't need no education,
We don't need no thought control,
No dark sarcasm in the classroom,
Teacher leave them kids alone,
Hey teacher! 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.

I spent a chunk of my youth chanting along with this Pink Floyd rock anthem. So, I was intrigued to learn that one of the leading lights of the recent student riots in London was the Pink Floyd lead guitarist David Gilmour's son, Charlie Gilmour. The rioters were protesting the government's plans to raise university fees.

David Gilmour thinks education is worse than a waste of time. Yet, his son Charlie believes education is very important, and should be massively subsidized by the state. How did father and son wind up having such dramatically different views?

Or are their views really all that different? On reflection, I suspect not.

Neither father or son really has a point of view on the positive externalities created by subsidized, over-consumed higher education. They are not policy wonks. They are musicians. They are expressing an emotion. I think both father and son are expressing exactly the same emotion.

Jack Black captured this emotion precisely in School of Rock:

"The Man is everywhere. In the White House, down the hall, Mrs. Mullins (the head mistress), she's the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, and he's burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! And there used to be a way to stick it to The Man. It was called rock ‘n’ roll."

I think that is what both father and son were doing. As young men, they were sticking it to The Man. Once upon a time The Man said "go to school". Now, The Man says "you can't go to school unless you pay for school". Regardless, rock 'n roll wants to stick it to The Man.

Admittedly, the son did get a little excessively carried away. But one lesson he will have learnt from his father, and his father's friends, is that sticking it to The Man does not preclude making it up with The Man at some later stage. For all David Gilmour's angst about education, he still sent his son to an expensive private school, and on to read history at Cambridge.