Don't crack up
Bend your brain
See both sides
Throw off your mental chains...
The lyrics above are from the chorus of the 1980s synth-pop classic New Song by British musician Howard Jones. OK, so the chorus is followed by the somewhat less meaningful 'Ooh ooh ooh', but for a pop song, the lyrics are actually philosophically insightful. Jones hasn't only written a catchy riff and a great hook line. He also seems to be berating the fact that much of our society is blindly following the trends, closing our eyes to reality, and accepting what the media and popular culture feed us, without questioning. He is challenging us to wake up, and see what is being done to us. Why for example, do MacDonalds and KFC only show thin people in their TV adverts? Why does the voice over for all of the major movie trailers almost always have to be a male - and a 'deep, baritone with dramatic tonal qualities' one at that? Why do the tabloid newspapers always use gut wrenchingly bad puns in their headlines? Because they know they can get away with it, and it shifts more units, and makes them more money, that's why. No one questions it. It is what it is.
I have sometimes witnessed the same mentality when students come through the doors of the university and into my classroom for the first time. They sit down, open up their laptops or notebooks, and sit there wide eyed, waiting to be told what to do next. They expect to be spoon fed, and I swear they give the impression that they are completely open to being told exactly 'what to think'. And yet, because they have been conditioned into being told what to do at school, and have been continually fed a diet of idealistic images and lifestyles from the likes of Bella, Hello, GQ and Nuts magazines, they have already decided that this is what the world really looks like. They have a preconceived idea about what education is about too. They couldn't be more wrong. It is only when their lecturers point out to them that they are expected to think independently, to accept nothing at face value, and to question everything, that they begin to wake up from their slumbers. It is really driven home later in their course, when they realise that they will only earn themselves higher grades for their assignments when they actually articulate this kind of thinking in their essays and projects. I can appreciate the sentiments behind Karl Marx's thesis of class consciousness. It is only, he argued, when the workers begin to wake up and realise that they are being exploited and controlled, that a true revolution can begin. But we are not calling for a revolution here - simply for students to learn how to 'bend their brains'.
The music video to accompanying New Song shows Howard Jones (and that strange little mime artist who always accompanied him everywhere) breaking out of the drudgery of factory life, escaping from the rat race on the London Underground, and finally - quite fittingly - liberating an entire class of school children (and their teacher) from a traditional classroom, and out into the open air. A good education, when properly applied is just like that - helping us to throw off our mental chains and to begin questioning the world around us. Critical thinking and an inquiring mind are all we really need. That's the only way we will ever see the world for what it really is.
Bend your brain by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Bend your brain
See both sides
Throw off your mental chains...
The lyrics above are from the chorus of the 1980s synth-pop classic New Song by British musician Howard Jones. OK, so the chorus is followed by the somewhat less meaningful 'Ooh ooh ooh', but for a pop song, the lyrics are actually philosophically insightful. Jones hasn't only written a catchy riff and a great hook line. He also seems to be berating the fact that much of our society is blindly following the trends, closing our eyes to reality, and accepting what the media and popular culture feed us, without questioning. He is challenging us to wake up, and see what is being done to us. Why for example, do MacDonalds and KFC only show thin people in their TV adverts? Why does the voice over for all of the major movie trailers almost always have to be a male - and a 'deep, baritone with dramatic tonal qualities' one at that? Why do the tabloid newspapers always use gut wrenchingly bad puns in their headlines? Because they know they can get away with it, and it shifts more units, and makes them more money, that's why. No one questions it. It is what it is.
I have sometimes witnessed the same mentality when students come through the doors of the university and into my classroom for the first time. They sit down, open up their laptops or notebooks, and sit there wide eyed, waiting to be told what to do next. They expect to be spoon fed, and I swear they give the impression that they are completely open to being told exactly 'what to think'. And yet, because they have been conditioned into being told what to do at school, and have been continually fed a diet of idealistic images and lifestyles from the likes of Bella, Hello, GQ and Nuts magazines, they have already decided that this is what the world really looks like. They have a preconceived idea about what education is about too. They couldn't be more wrong. It is only when their lecturers point out to them that they are expected to think independently, to accept nothing at face value, and to question everything, that they begin to wake up from their slumbers. It is really driven home later in their course, when they realise that they will only earn themselves higher grades for their assignments when they actually articulate this kind of thinking in their essays and projects. I can appreciate the sentiments behind Karl Marx's thesis of class consciousness. It is only, he argued, when the workers begin to wake up and realise that they are being exploited and controlled, that a true revolution can begin. But we are not calling for a revolution here - simply for students to learn how to 'bend their brains'.
The music video to accompanying New Song shows Howard Jones (and that strange little mime artist who always accompanied him everywhere) breaking out of the drudgery of factory life, escaping from the rat race on the London Underground, and finally - quite fittingly - liberating an entire class of school children (and their teacher) from a traditional classroom, and out into the open air. A good education, when properly applied is just like that - helping us to throw off our mental chains and to begin questioning the world around us. Critical thinking and an inquiring mind are all we really need. That's the only way we will ever see the world for what it really is.
Bend your brain by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Bend your brain
![Bend your brain]()
Reviewed by MCH
on
January 13, 2014
Rating:
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