An interview with Martin Atkins.

• Author: Slekar, Tim
• Position: Interview

If public education was done right, wouldn't all teachers simply be punk rockers?

It might seem odd to feature the punk rock drummer from the bands Public Image Ltd, Ministry, Nine Inch Nails, Pigface, and Killing Joke in the pages of an edition of The Progressive dedicated to public education. But rocker-turned-teacher Martin Atkins has a lot to say about getting down to the roots of teaching, music, and life.

Q: I heard you are selling a shirt, "Education Is the New Punk Rock." What the hell does that mean?

Martin Atkins: It's "the next punk rock," actually, although "new punk rock" works as well. I teach a class on punk. We look at music genres. And I show students my appalling report card from when I was a kid a few years before punk rock started in England.

Throughout that lecture, which has evolved over the last several years, we're talking about, "What are punk values?" I think it's "Jump in at the deep end," "Here's a chord, here's another, now start a band," which I think might have actually come from Woody Guthrie originally.

But the other punk idea was to question everything, not to accept what is told to you as being factual, investigate things for yourself, and make things happen.

And that's all I've tried to do since I've gotten into education, to take a kind of a punk rock view of what's happening.

I kind of treat the classroom like it's a gig, and I look at my lectures like a set list, because if you don't view the classroom as theater you lose attention.

Q: Have you had experiences with the American public education system that pushed you in this direction? What's the punk rock response to what we call "education reform" here--the takeover of public schools by charters, by choice, by competition?

Atkins: Just last week, I was in Lincoln Park High School, lecturing to sixteen-year-olds in a program, and I think my Facebook activity about that precipitated a school in Akron to call me, to say their music program had just been cut, and to ask me if I would go and speak to their students. Of course they don't have a budget. But I don't care. When I'm on the road, I'm happy to stop off and talk to anybody about anything.

So I think that's how I see working it--just going straight to the kids and doing it.

When I was a punk rock kid, I used to be on the street drinking a lot, taking prescription speed. I was on the street throwing rocks at the building of the musical establishment, metaphorically and probably literally, too.

But...