Radical influences

I first visited Johnston as a high school senior on a sleepover visit in 1974 or early 1975. My high school guidance counselor recommended that I consider Johnston specifically because she thought I would be overly susceptible to radical influences if I were to go to Berkeley, which I must have mentioned to her as one possible place I was thinking of applying to. If asked, I would have described myself as a pacifist, and if asked again as an anarchist, in my political convictions. All the result of book-reading… I was reading books on “experimental education” that ranged from liberal excoriations of the discriminatory school system to instant anthologies of high school underground newspaper writing to absolute condemnations of all forms of education in schools as such, and skating across the muddle of positions both casually dismissive of and utterly subservient to my opportunities for achievement in high school: writing angst-filled pieces in English classes, taking lit and psychology and sociology through Moorpark, the local community college, and doing what needed to be done to get my A’s in everything else I had to take.