The Way It Is

Directed by Harold Mayer

This documentary (first of a five-part series on education) examines the battle to educate at Junior High School 57-a slum school in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto. In September 1966, New York University's Clinic for Learning, backed by a Ford Foundation grant, began an educational rehabilitation program at the school. The object: to reach apparently unreachable and disinterested students before they become drop-outs. Cameras look in on a seventh grade class, observing new approaches to working with disadvantaged youngsters: challenging students to be more aggressive in their studies; permitting class members to hold arguments pertaining to their lessons; and attempting to establish more personal contact between teachers and students. There are also problems. Discipline is poor among the students, who must be taught to have respect for themselves and for the education they can get.