Tellin’ The World

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.

The Inheritance shows what life was really like for immigrants and working Americans from the turn of the century through the fight for civil rights in the 1960s. This stirring history of our country shows their struggle to put down roots, form labor unions, survive wars, and finally, create a new and better life for themselves and our nation. The film explores a landscape largely unknown to the present generation - the dim sweatshops, coal mines and textile mills filled with children; the anxious years of the depression and labor's bloody struggle for the right to organize; the battlefields of WW I and II; the seldom seen newsreel footage of the Memorial Day massacre at The Republic Steel strike in Chicago; the civil rights struggle - as every generation fights again to preserve and extend its freedoms. This is the film's theme. Judy Collins sings this theme song, as well as more great music sung by Judy, Pete Seeger, Tom Paxton and others.