The counterculture had a core belief: humans are born curious, self-sufficient, creative beings—until school and society grind it out of them. The Whole Earth Catalog, packed with alt-ed gear, child psychology paperbacks, and playthings for future grown-ups with revolutionary streaks, was tangled in a web of grassroots educational activism, which Stewart Brand felt warranted its own publication. At the ranch where the Catalog was produced, he asked Sam Yanes, the struggling groundskeeper recovering from the dissolution of a Berkeley commune: “Would you be interested in tackling the educational part of what I’m doing here?” The resulting spinoff, Big Rock Candy Mountain, was a catalog modeled after the Catalog, but dedicated entirely to the Free School movement and its tools. It stands as a testament to a generation of learners yearning to reclaim their inner depth and complexity. A new subject would ring in the New Age, someone uncorrupted by school and society, someone imaginative, playful, and whole. The radical child—both mobilized as a neglected population and projected as an unadulterated way of being and aspirational otherness—linked the two main concerns of the counterculture: classroom liberation and ecological sustainability.