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This little composition was written for an English class, the assignment being the fairly nebulous goal of a “persuasive essay about Berkeley High.” Oui, mon seigneur; and since it’s done anyway and there’s been no updates this week, I figure you might want to read it, or whatever it is you usually do with news posts.

Don’t take it too seriously.

Berkeley High School is a hell of a thing.

In one sense, almost a bureaucracy, and in another, a paragon of hippie-ish libertarianism, Berkeley High has appeal aplenty but problems profound, yet the strongest sense when one wanders the campus — save for that of bemused indulgence — is a startling lack of identity.

An unusual premise, considering that despite the becoming apathy and head-on-your-desk world-weariness, BHS students are generally considered at their best when able and encouraged to express a sense of identity and spirit. Consider Spirit Week.

However, although most of the Berkeley High studentry is willing to move in herdlike motions of grudging spirit, one could pose the challenge that really, none of them know what they are.

Observe: Berkeley High is located, reasonably, in Berkeley, a national Mecca of liberal, free-thinking, left-wing attitudes. The district and school itself are perfect manifestations of this, reeking at every turn of stumbling, prostrating political correctness, with an actual department devoted to studying outside the textbook and a year-long required course that is essentially a political falling-on-the-sword for the favor of the uberprogressives. The atmosphere, almost but not quite without exception, is one of feignedly studious, faux-zealous sensitivity, a bastard child of the arts of walking on social eggs and kowtowing at the feet of a revered master, whilst peeking assiduously around at his fur-trimmed boots to see when he might leave so you can go back to your business. As with any religious center, there is more of a focus on paying lip service to the accepted conventions and dogmatic writ than there is in taking it to heart, and while there are always some true fanatics, they are viewed quietly by the secularists as just that — fanatics.

That is one side.

On the other: Berkeley High is the quintessential example of the overbearing, staggeringly top-heavy institution. It has more administrative holes than a block of US Government cheese. Scheduling is an exercise in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Seeking help from a counselor is on par with attending a lobotomy of mass destruction, and it’s a rare year, month, week, or day when some new ”¡oy, madre!” anecdote is not exchanged featuring the scandalous adventures of the powers that be, generally something related to putting their clothing on backwards or pushing at a pull door. Change in the system is temporally on par with continental shift. There is no sensitivity in statistics, transcripts, and formulae for the consternations of the liberal elite. There is no love for the downtrodden in the harsh shadow of graduation requirements.

These two faces of the school, while not always directly at arms, overlap in their contradictory claims far too often. The simple fact remains that the “lovable, understanding uncle” memetic framing is in its essence a grating misconvergence with that of the “concrete, straight-walking bureaucracy,” and no matter how the two quick-step to justify their disagreements and how they seek to coexist, they can no more live in peace than a fur salesman can represent the SPCA. And while these two faces can function — with squeaking and clanking if not with actual collision — it will still fall to the student himself to be bewildered at the equivocal nature of his school, his community, and himself.

— Brandon