Northeast High School was founded in 1890 as the Northeast Manual Training School. | Image courtesy of Temple University Libraries, Special Collections Research Center Northeast Manual Training School on Howard Street below Girard Avenue a week before it was demolished in 1932. In the 21st century, however, demographic shifts have made this erstwhile bastion of whiteness into a multiracial, multilingual, multiethnic place of learning that Philadelphia’s 1950s and 60s era of “nice white parents” could scarcely have imagined.
If you have listened to the popular podcast “ Nice White Parents,” it will be a familiar tale. The story of how Northeast High School became a nearly all-white institution beginning in 1968 is an extraordinary tale of structural racism. Among the hundreds of students shown over the course of the film, all are white with the exception of five black boys, only one of whom we hear speak.
was assassinated when camera crews were on-site, this is a sealed off world of conformity, conventionality, and extreme homogeneity. No questions asked.Īlthough the Tet Offensive in Vietnam had occurred the month before filming, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Respect for teachers, for rules, for adult authority is more important than fairness. The school disciplinarian, sporting a crewcut and a University of Pennsylvania class ring, dismisses any student concerns and metes out detentions and suspensions to all who come before him. Like robots in gym clothes, girls perform a listless choreography to the song “Simple Simon Says.” They are sternly warned to avoid wearing culottes. Girls, on the other hand, receive a humorless lecture on the perils of promiscuity. Even when she plays the song, on a giant contraption she has borrowed from the theater department, the zombie vibe persists.Īmong the boys, signs of life emerge in the form of snickers and guffaws as a skeevy gynecologist offers bawdy replies to their anonymously submitted questions about sex. In another classroom, her younger counterpart reads aloud the lyrics to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Dangling Conversation” to a similarly disengaged group of students. An older English teacher, for example, recites the dozen verses of the song “Casey at the Bat” to her audience of expressionless teenagers. Teachers, clad in suits or dresses, deliver content as students, dressed only a bit less formally, sit passively listening. It was filmed at Northeast High School during March and April of 1968. | Image: Kanopyįred Wiseman’s cinema verité documentary High School is a 75-minute time capsule of a different world. Film poster of director Fred Wiseman’s 1968 documentary High School.
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