Schools of alienation.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: School culture is acknowledged as repressive and brutish

The Hobbesian culture of American education

The victims of the Columbine High School shootings in Littleton, Colorado, have been buried, if not fully laid to rest. Even as the incident fades from sharp memory and the schools empty for summer vacation, there's a good reason why this terrifying incident should haunt our national consciousness longer than similar tragedies in Springfield, Oregon; Jonesboro, Arkansas; West Paducah, Kentucky; and Pearl, Mississippi. It's not simply because the death toll is so much higher than in past massacres, or the mayhem so much more calculated.

However horrific, the actions of other schoolyard gunmen such as Kip Kinkel or Luke Woodham can be readily understood as stemming from individual pathologies and, hence, not particularly reflective of broader social issues. In contrast, the Columbine shootings can be seen as implicating not only the killers' own sick, twisted minds, but a school culture which humiliated and tormented them in ways that are all too familiar to most Americans.

The result has been a highly uncomfortable - but strangely understandable - empathy for Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. When Newsweek quotes a classmate saying that the two walked the halls of Columbine "with their heads down, because if they looked up they'd get thrown into lockers and get called a 'fag,'" who doesn't exactly understand the anger and frustration such abuse inspires? When Time reports that they were routinely physically threatened and taunted as "dirt bags" and "inbreeds," who doesn't feel a twinge of outrage on their behalf? In a strange way - and one starkly at odds with the early media narrative of Klebold and Harris as isolated, inhuman killing machines - the pair almost emerged from the coverage as high school everymen, stand-ins for every bad memory of adolescent injury in a school setting.

After writing a column on the shooting for the World Wide Web site Slashdot.org, journalist Jon Katz was surprised to receive a deluge of "jarring testimonials from kids, adults, men and women" that while in no way exonerating the killers, "explained more - a lot more - about Littleton than all the vapid media stories about video violence, Goths, [and] game-crazed geeks." As one respondent put it, "I'm a geek under the skin...was a state champ in the high jump, and the leading scorer on the track team, so I was not quite the outcast that some...geeks are, but I understand what they are going through." Or, as another...