Television Reviews : Viewers Can Cruise Through ‘High School’

Surprise! Our children are bored by school, are ill-served by social pressures and the educational process and are graduating in large numbers unprepared for real life.

Don’t expect to learn much in “Cruising Through High School,” a documentary filmed in two Northern California high schools, airing Saturday at 6 p.m. on Channel 28.

This sketchy chronicle of teens’ attitudes toward school is the result of a full school year of “candid” filming. Several seniors are observed as they head toward graduation, or drop out along the way.

We meet Ryan, an athletic and academic success who ultimately winds up with a baseball scholarship to Stanford. His friend Rich, whose aspirations are less lofty, just hopes to finish school, get a job and get married.

There is Theresa, studying at home through a program designed for those who can’t cope at school, and Ralph, who drops out, despite undemanding “sandwich-making” and auto shop classes.

The trouble is that we never get beneath the surface. Erratic sound quality, trite camera work and irritatingly pedological, overly enunciated narration--the kind that causes mass classroom somnolence--doesn’t help.

We’re told that “underlying student disinterest in academic matters is the appeal of other things in their lives” and “school attempts to regulate behavior closely; persistent violation of school rules may result in expulsion or transfer to a continuation school.”

Who is this aimed at, anyway? This is what many students tune out every day.

Toward the end, the hour comes briefly to life in a segment on Julie, who beats the odds and becomes the first member of her family to graduate. This segment has some depth and the narrator is thankfully silent much of the time.

Without the narration, the film’s images of undernourished intellects and blind self-absorption may have had more impact. Instead, co-producers and directors Julio Moline and Prof. Bob Gliner of San Jose State University simply leave viewers with more arid academia.