“From the chaos and controversy of Titicut Follies, Wiseman moved on to the comparatively placid hallways of public high school for his second film. Yet from his fragmented sequences, visual puns, unsympathetic close-ups, and witty cuts, he produces an ultimately scathing evaluation of North East High School in Philadelphia, considered one of the top schools in the city at the time. Droning an incessant message of control, repression and conformity to a generally listless student body, teachers and administrators prowl the hallways, ridicule independent thought, dictate, manipulate, confuse and simply bore the teenagers into submitting to a generic existence. By the film’s end, the familiar institutional languor and disciplinary monotone of public schools offers a shockingly smug confirmation of its own moribund purpose.” -Harvard Film Archive
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“High School, a wicked, brilliant documentary about life in a lower-middle-class secondary school.” –Richard Schickel, Life
“High School shows no stretching of minds. It does show the overwhelming dreariness of administrators and teachers who confuse teaching with discipline. The school somehow takes warm, breathing teen-agers and tries to turn them into 40-year old mental eunuchs… No wonder the kids turn off, stare out windows, become surly, try to escape… The most frightening thing about High School is that it captures the battlefield so clearly; the film is too true.” –Peter Janssen, Newsweek
“The high school is the very heart of America, and Wiseman has captured its strength and rhythm perfectly.” –Edgar Z. Friedenberg, The New York Review of Books
