High School II

HIGH SCHOOL II is a film about Central Park East Secondary School (CPESS), a successful alternative high school in New York’s Spanish Harlem, 85-95% of whose graduates go on to four-year colleges. The film highlights the school’s emphasis on the “Habits of Mind” programme—weighing evidence; considering multiple points of view; seeing connections and relationships; speculating on possibilities; and assessing values.

Sequences illustrating the school’s approach to learning include classroom activities in the humanities and sciences; family conferences; discussions of race, class, and gender; faculty meetings; disciplinary problems; sex education; student conflict resolution; and student council meetings.

Whereas its predecessor, HIGH SCHOOL (1968), captured an education model where the predictability of outcomes is valorized, HIGH SCHOOL II counters with an open-ended one—praised by one educator as rigorously scientific—with all the human trials that emerge when student autonomy is foregrounded. Scenes of mediation, analysis of the Shakespearean models of love, and problems based in math and protest strategies alike are subject to debate. Shot in the aftermath of the Rodney King trial, the film captures an organisation of people dedicated to constant reflection. It might, accordingly, be Wiseman’s most self-reflexive film.

This film is part of FREDERICK WISEMAN: LOOKING FOR CONNECTION, in which ten films by the American master of documentary form the backbone of a programme about communities and third spaces.