National Educational Television and Radio Center Mayer, Harold Voynow, Zena Sopanen, Jeri

Description

Episode Number: 164Episode Number: 133In September 1966, a major metropolitan university took on a major problem in secondary education - the ghetto school. Backed by a Ford Foundation grant, New York University's Clinic for Learning focused its attention and talents on Junior High School 57 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. At the same time, producer Harold Mayer and his crew arrived for a documentary study of the ghetto school. Original impressions were far from encouraging. The NET film begins with some of these impressions. During a special meeting, members of the NYU project describe the reigning mood of each classroom - bedlam, disinterest, no reading skills. How can you make them hear? Asks Jack Robertson, project director. The camera moves abruptly to a series of classrooms, where children play tic-tac-toe, drum on their desks, shout at each other, shove, fall off chairs, dance, or sit on a radiator in an attitude of withdrawal. Nowhere is there a sense of attention. As one teacher laments: "These kids just don't believe in words." Confronted with this chaos, the NYU group and individual teachers try various approaches to "reach" the children. Working separately with a troubled boy, an English teacher encourages him to deal with language. A Negro teacher of arithmetic shouts "I challenge you" to a boy engaged in a problem at the blackboard. Members of his class are permitted to sing and to argue among themselves - as long as the subject is arithmetic. In another class, students read "Black...

Record Contributed By

Indiana University Libraries Moving Image Archive

Record Harvested From

Digital Commonwealth