For some years now I have heard prospective secondary school teachers say that, when they become teachers, they will it (i.e., they say they will make interesting for their students history, or English, or whatever their subject matter field might be). They state that most of their secondary school teachers did not make it interesting, but they believe they can. However, great numbers of them do not make it interesting either. Why not? I wonder if there is not more to it, if it does not go deeper than just the matter of the teacher or teaching or the teacher making it interesting. We recognize, of course, many reasons why teachers fail to make it interesting. In this paper I shall examine some reasons related to the system in which the teacher works and to teacher preparation. In the May 19, '1969, issue of Newsweek appeared two separate reviews of Frederick Wiseman's remarkable documentary film, High School: one by Joseph Morgenstern and another by Peter A. Janssen, respectively the movies editor and the education editor of Newsweek. High School was filmed entirely at Philadelphia's Northeast High, an almost all-white, suburban-type institution. According to Janssen, Northeast is one of Philadelphia's best schools; it is no better and no worse than thousands of other middle-class schools across the country. It does not suffer problems of the ghetto, of white teachers and black pupils, of greatly overcrowded classes, of parents who do not care. It cannot fall back on excuses about disadvantaged children and underachievers. Northeast thoroughly represents the upper level of American public education. Janssen says the message High School so brutally transmits is that high schools are prisons where the old beat down the young, where raw material is run through the machine and stamped BLAND.2 Morgenstern says the school's. . . ideals are un-American by any rational reading of our history-passivity dressed up as well-adjustedness, conformity dressed up as respect for authority. The kids just don't respond, even when a teacher really teaches (and there's occasional evidence of real teaching in the film). Why should they respond to representatives of a system that humiliates them, insults them, diminishes them and tries its level worst to demolish their previous selves? [my emphasis]3 Silberman says he found, in his extensive study in preparing his book, Crisis in the Classroom, that, by and large, teachers are decent, intelligent, and caring people who try to do