Pink Floyd’s “We Don’t Need No Education” was the Christmas No. 1 in Britain in 1979. Its official title is “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)”. It was the band’s first UK single since “Point Me at the Sky” in 1968, and it came from the double album The Wall. Roger Waters wrote it, and it has been known by its most chanted phrase ever since.
It is one of three linked pieces called “Another Brick in the Wall” on the album, a rock opera. This is the middle one, and the one that caught on with the public. It is a protest against cruel, joyless schooling, sung partly by actual schoolchildren over a pulse that borrows from disco.
A rock opera, a disco beat and a choir
By 1979 Pink Floyd were known for long, atmospheric albums rather than singles. The Wall changed the approach. Waters, the band’s bassist and principal songwriter, built the record around isolation, and the “bricks” of the title stand for the experiences that wall a person off. This part of the story is about school.
Producer Bob Ezrin suggested both of the song’s most unusual features. One was the disco-flavored beat, which Gilmour has said grew out of Ezrin’s push to make the part catchy. The other was a children’s choir. The singers were 23 pupils from Islington Green School, near the band’s London studio, and their voices were overdubbed 12 times to sound like a much larger crowd. The pupils reportedly received concert tickets and copies of the album and single for their work.
Waters and Gilmour share the lead vocal. The children take the second verse and chorus, and their shouted, unpolished delivery is what makes the track memorable.
What Waters said it was about
Waters drew on his own boys’ grammar school. In a 1979 interview with the British radio presenter Tommy Vance, he said some teachers were wonderful but others crushed children in order to keep them quiet. He added that the song was “not meant to be a blanket condemnation of teachers everywhere”.
He later said some listeners misread the title phrase as a crude revolutionary slogan, which he thought was wrong in context. He also noted that the Archbishop of Canterbury of the day suggested the song’s popularity with schoolchildren was a reason to start a conversation about it.
Number one on both sides of the Atlantic
The single spent five weeks at No. 1 in the UK across December 1979 and January 1980. In the US it reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 on March 22, 1980, replacing Queen’s “Crazy Little Thing Called Love”. It held the top spot for four weeks before Blondie’s “Call Me” took over. It remains Pink Floyd’s only US chart-topper.
It also topped the charts in several other countries, including Canada, Norway, Portugal, New Zealand and West Germany. It earned a Grammy nomination for Best Performance by a Rock Duo or Group, but lost to Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind”. The Wall itself spent 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and has been certified 23 times Platinum by the RIAA.
Banned in South Africa
The song’s most serious afterlife came in South Africa. Boycotts at black schools began in Cape Town in February 1980, just as the single entered the local chart. A month later it was No. 1 there, and students used it as a rallying cry against the unequal apartheid education system.
The Directorate of Publications banned the single in early May 1980, and the album was eventually banned as well. Waters later wrote that the apartheid government imposed “a cultural blockade, so to speak” on certain songs, his own included. The ban effectively ended as apartheid was dismantled in the early 1990s.
Where it stands now
The song won the BAFTA for Best Original Song in 1983 through its use in the film of The Wall. Waters has guarded it carefully. In 2021 he turned down what he described as a huge sum from Facebook to use it in an advertising campaign.
The album behind it is still being revisited. The strains of the 1980 to 1981 Wall tour left the four members unable to share a stage again for 24 years. The children’s chant that closed the 1970s is still the part of Pink Floyd’s catalog that most people can sing without hearing a note of the rest.