Storyville, Try Harder, BBC 4, BBC iPlayer, directed by Debbie Lum.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0014j4m/storyville-try-harder

I’m unfamiliar with the American college application process. It’s a big country, but modelled, in theory, so school-test scores determine which colleges will accept students. The American dream is a quite simple belief that if you work hard you’ll get your just rewards. Student, Tina Zheng, for example, plans to be a brain surgeon.

The adolescents featured in this documentary stay mostly tight-lipped. Their collective goal is to get into an Ivy League College. Harvard is mentioned. Stanford College features as a possibility, but with less than five percent chance of gaining entry. And UCLA. They are all A+ students. Rachel Schmidt’s test-scores, for example, put her in the top 1% in America. Alvan Cai’s mum and dad come from Taiwan. They do everything for their son. Test scores in Taiwan determine a boy’s future. They have left nothing to chance. But Alvan worries that his parents are out of step. Offering vouchers for food or the pictures or even a red envelope with God knows in it might be regarded as bribery by college administrators. UCLA, for example, receive over 102 000 applicants to study at their college every year. That number is growing and increasingly most applicants will have A+ grade to have a realistic chance to be considered.

Granada’s documentary series 7UP, a World in Action special in 1964 had much the same premise. The Jesuit dictum:  ‘Give me the boy and I’ll give you the man’. Director Michael Apted is dead now, but I think we are up to 64UP.  It was classified a snapshot of social class. Looking at it a life-time later, it went pretty much as expected. Those Eton-educated kids with marbles in their mouths did prosper and did go to Oxbridge Universities.  

Debbie Lum has her viewfinder not so much on class but race and ethnicity. San Francisco’s Lowell High School is a hothouse of the super-smart. The majority of whom are one of the fastest growing proportion of the American immigrant population—Asian Americans. Ivy League colleges their teachers warn them view high-test scores from Lowell students as a given, but question whether such students can think for themselves. Viewing them as robotic. In other words, such institutions are inherently racist, but without acknowledging, for example, college quota’s for Jewish students that were in place until the 1950s. Black students, of course, had their own colleges.

Class bias is often race in disguise. In 21UP, for example, the Yorkshire son of a farmer told how his cohort in university assumed he’d be stupid because of the way he spoke and the accent he used. Similarly, Rachel Schmidt who has a black mother may be smarter than most, even at Lowell, but her successful application to Stanford College was due to her being black. Asian Americans adopting the arguments of the far-right white groups that would send them back to wherever, because it didn’t really matter. The only thing that did matter for Neo-Nazis was they weren’t white and therefore couldn’t be right. In fact, were stupid. In the land of the free, Richard Powers,  Overstory, characterisation: ‘The immigrant’s son yields to the disease of improvement before there is an effective cure’.