In an interview with Tommy Vance, Roger Waters revealed that the song was written to condemn his childhood teachers:

Um. My school life was very like that. Oh, it was awful, it was really terrible. When I hear people whining on now about bringing back Grammar schools it really makes me quite ill to listen to it. Because I went to a boys Grammar school and although… I want to make it plain that some of the men who taught (it was a boys school) some of the men who taught there were very nice guys, you know I’m not… it’s not meant to be a blanket condemnation of teachers everywhere, but the bad ones can really do people in–and there were some at my school who were just incredibly bad and treated the children so badly, just putting them down, putting them down, you know, all the time. Never encouraging them to do things, not really trying to interest them in anything, just trying to keep them quiet and still, and crush them into the right shape, so that they would go to university and “do well.”