Songfacts®:

• Rise Against frontman Tim McIlrath spoke to MTV News about this song: "It's talking a lot about the 9-to-5, dog-eat-dog lifestyle, and what we are asked to do to simply make ends meet nowadays, and I think it's a feeling shared by people all around the world and especially in this country."
• "Re-Education (Through Labor)" was the first single from the Appeal To Reason album, a breakthrough for Rise Against, which had been at it since 1999. The point of the title is that the values they stand for (fairness, free speech) are far from radical. Even though they're punk rockers railing against institutional oppression, they're preaching common sense.
• The song's music video was directed by Kevin Kerslake (Faith No More, Green Day) and filmed in the band's home city of Chicago. McIlrath admitted to MTV News that the promo does have a slightly political theme, which practically anyone will relate to. He explained: "One of the great things about doing a video is that your imagination is the only thing that's limiting you, so you can do anything. So we have a video that's going to encompass the anger and the angst that the youth of America feel toward society at large and the things that are demanded of them."
• Guitarist Zach Blair explained to Ultimate-Guitar how this song's sound evolved: "I remember Tim, this riff, duh do uh diddlediddlediddle uh, and we even referred to it as somewhat like a southern rockish kind of riff. Because it is a different kind of sound than the rest of the stuff. But I think the idea in the first place was to go at it with that sort of more rock and rollish kind of feel. Which I think is a new kind of sound for the band pretty much for this record; that song to me sounded different than anything the band had done. But of course once we played it it sounded like Rise Again. So that's one of the things I was really excited about because it did have such a different approach than anything else that I'd really heard the band do."