I have two
1.I can’t find it online right now, but I’ve found it before. High School (that’s the full name) a 1968 documentary by Frederick Wiseman. The director films for several weeks in a school that if I recall correctly is in a suburb of Philadelphia. For those interested in history, it’s a fascinating document of the transition between the greater concern for the collective in the United States from the 1950s and prior and the individual rights concerns starting in the 1960s (although they were also around before of course, especially in the 1920s.) The director is clearly focused on the notion of individual rights via the students vs. what is often a rather oppressive faculty. Although there are also scenes of the teacher’s discussing and debating the proper ways to act, and there are other teachers who are genuinely sympathetic with the students.
At one point, one of the students who without thinking wore a miniskirt to a formal dance is, along with other students, asked to see the principal. She even says to him “I wasn’t trying to be individualistic.”
There are a couple sort of creepy scenes. The director I believe is trying to contrast the idea of the miniskirt being inappropriate with the shorts that the girls wear without concern in gym class. However, while the girls are dancing to the tune of Simple Simon Says the director focuses on their backsides,
And, the,, I guess, fairly famous scene at the end of the film where the school Vice Principal is reading a letter from a student who volunteered to go to Vietnam where the student wrote something like “The school taught me that I’m secondary to my country” and it seems clear he’s bitter and sarcastic, but the clueless vice principal ends up saying something like “we’re so pleased here that we successfully passed on this lesson to this student.”
However, I learned about this film while listening to the Simon and Garfunkel song “The Dangling Conversation” because an obviously genuinely caring English teacher used the song to teach poetry to the students (rather than, say, poetry from dead English poets.) Ironically, however, Paul Simon himself has criticized this song of his as something like ‘poetry a first year college student would write.’
