Frederick Wiseman's remarkable documentary film, High School, is worth seeing. For it shows that our most serious educational problems aren't only in slum schools. What people think of as the good schools are failing their children, too….

[Wiseman] sets out to portray a reputable high school, not a blackboard jungle. High School suggests no remedies. In words alone, its message can be reduced to a string of cliches: the schools are authoritarian, repressive, and so on. On film—on this film, anyway—the cliches take on density and complexity, carrying us beyond slogans into artistic truth. Scene after scene builds to a powerful cumulative effect—not of anger, but of immense sadness and futility: this is how we live. High School is an essay on emptiness.

Though far from sympathetic, the camera eye is not cruel. The teachers seem decent and well-meaning. What they say doesn't matter much. What counts are the numbing lessons the whole institution is teaching its students about themselves and life. (p. 28)

All hopes and dreams are dented, those of parents as well as students. I felt tugged in different directions watching an interview between some parents and a counsellor. The regal father is ambitious for his daughter, perhaps too ambitious…. [Why], one wonders, is the message at Northeast [High School] so insistent, and why is there so much bitter joy in the work of denial? At last the father imagines possibilities for the girl: the school is quick to snuff out visions. In another scene, I had the same torn feelings about the school's protection of students. A college counsellor tells a girl she can apply to all her dream colleges, but that she should have a college of last resort, "if none of your dreams came true." Again, sensible advice. But in Northeast, this begins to sound suspicious. Too many people are insisting on defeat….

The school asks little from the students, as teachers keep saying. Order is the main thing, and most students seem to find it easy to pay homage to order. In a few scenes students are openly insulted. A girl has it explained to her how wearing a short dress to the prom is an insult to the school. She must learn to abide by the standards of the majority. (The majority is constantly invoked.) "I think it's nice to be individualistic, but there are certain places to be individualistic," the teacher says. Under pressure, near tears, the girl recants: "I didn't mean to be individualistic." (p. 29)

The camera lingers questioningly on the faces of the kids, but the faces are mysterious, and you have no way of fathoming what they make of this—some decent teaching about something interesting, for a change. Deliberately, Frederick Wiseman confines himself all through the film to what the school elicits from the students. We have no way of knowing what they feel about the school. It is entirely possible that they are as complacent about it as the staff, even though it obviously bores them. Maybe, after all, they learned the main lesson: don't expect much….

High School should be seen for its own extraordinary merits. But it will surely become a weapon in the war of styles of life and classes now dividing America. Many will insist that the reason Northeast is such a mournful place is that it institutionalizes the attitudes of a repressed lower-middle class. There is room for this view. But it's incomplete. (p. 30)