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...