The wall

“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! Teachers!
Leave them kids alone
All in all,
you’re just bricks in the wall
All in all,
you’re just another brick in the wall”
—Pink Floyd

He must admit taking offense when first he heard it. He was not a big Pink Floyd fan when he was younger. He preferred instead the more folksy, more acoustic bands like CSNY, Simon and Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, Carole King, etc. And Pink Floyd was always electric and psychedelic. It was fringe when fringe was not yet quite in vogue. And yet, it was the song that entered his head when he first accepted he was going to be a teacher. “We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control.”

The first course he ever taught was photography. The regular teacher who handled it ran away for reasons unknown. It could not have been anything besides that he had a better deal somewhere else. He taught the course to upwards from 20 students. Only he had a camera. This was the mid 1980s. Cell phone cameras were not yet even seen as imaginable.

But he had graduated and would now be teaching in a school where everything was impossible. “Imadyina Ang Imposible!” was and still is the motto of the Fine Arts Students Organization of that school. “Dark sarcasm in the classroom” was unavoidable. And he decided as soon as he decided he would be a teacher that all in all, he was not going to be “just another brick in the wall.”

He became a teacher in the last years of Marcos’ martial law. He graduated high school in 1972, exactly the same year martial law was declared. And all about him: The wall! It was everywhere. But mostly in the minds of people who even in those years thought that martial law was good for us. And all because, it was saving us from communism. Notwithstanding young people were being jailed, oftentimes, summarily executed. And all because in a difficult time, they concerned themselves with trying to solve the problem of poverty. In quite a dangerous time, they sided with the poor.

The fact did not escape him that the whole educational system of the country, including his own school, conspired to maintain the wall that in the course of his teaching career would crumble quite rapidly in the face of its own untenable contradictions. This, at least, where the wall of martial law was concerned. But there would be other walls.

In real life, no sooner than one wall falls do we come to other walls right behind it. Such is the nature of real life. Pink Floyd was, of course, talking about walls in general, walls in a wide array of possible readings and interpretations. Including, in his case, the wall which often exists between the teacher and his student. Which wall if one is a good teacher is always something akin to sacred. One takes it down slowly and always with grace and much care.

After reading what Pope Francis had to say about poverty in his visit to Paraguay, the Pink Floyd song played incessantly in his head. He cannot be sure why. But when Teacher Francis tells the youth to “Make a mess!” The thought of it echoes in his mind as the song from Pink Floyd.

It is the wall of an age-old inertia that Pope Francis wants the youth to break down. Also the wall of poverty, the wall of uncaring Catholicism. The wall as it exists now wants us to think in terms of silly old doctrines having to do with birth control, same-sex marriage, or just sex in general. Old issues having little to do with the real problems of the world. He cannot help thinking: It is this wall that Pope Francis wants the young to make a mess of, to paint graffiti on, to question, to take apart brick by brick in the same sense of Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd, who with their song suggest: It is the learning of love and wisdom, not education, which we truly need.