c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ High schools are jungles. So, for that matter, are colleges.

It is surprising not that the natives periodically kill one another and often rape one another. Rather it is surprising that there is not more murder and mayhem. Parents must forget what cruel, heartless, and mean-spirited places high schools were when they were teens.

As long as we permit adolescents to buy and possess automatic weapons, we will have repeats of the Columbine High School massacre. However, mass murder would be much less likely in a high school environment which had not become a jungle.

The problem with high schools _ especially new suburban high schools _ is that they are normless. They suffer from what sociologists call anomie, meaning they are devoid of community and moral values and social control.

But this is not an accident. It is the result of the underlying philosophy of public education.

The photos of Columbine make it clear that it was a new, expensive, even dazzling place. Build it new, build it big, build it costly, build it with every facility from computers to sports centers, the educators tell us, and you’ll have the best education for your sons and daughters that money can buy.

But, with some happy exceptions, such schools provide no sense of community around which confused young people can rally. They do not teach, either in the classroom or outside of it, any sense of values, of loyalty, of respect.

The administration and faculty have little authority or power over either the behavior or the academic performance of the students. For all practical purposes there is no such thing as discipline. The school does not dare to expel a student or even to impose anything more than the most general rules of civilized behavior and for all practical purposes, teachers and administrators are peripheral if not irrelevant to the school’s social order. The animals run the zoo.

At the same time, the educators cover up the situation with whatever happens to be the current academic cant _ currently happy talk about self-esteem.

For the most part students come to the school not as members of pre-existing communities _ parishes, congregations, neighborhoods _ but as isolated individuals. Moreover, the school does its best to ignore such pre-existing communities and to convert the young people into isolated individuals who can be maneuvered from activity to activity according to rational flow charts.

So what happens? The young men and women, being humans and social animals who need values and community, form their own social groups. So-called”cliques”are the result of the absence of norms and routine behavior patterns. For all their bravado, teens tend to be fragile and frightened novices in facing the challenges of life. Since the school is unable and unwilling to provide them with the slightest clues about what life means and how one should behave, they turn to one another for something to believe in and something to belong to. The animals in the zoo teach the other animals what the zoo is about.

Frightened by the cliques _ as they are frightened by parents, school boards, legislators and anyone else with power _ the educators pretend that they do not exist and hence abdicate the last vestige of control they might have. It is in such a situation that the sick kids with guns appear.

I know of a high school whose assistant principal’s sole responsibility is to walk the corridors, talk to the young people, win their confidence, and keep an eye on the cliques. The students admire and respect him because he at least cares about them.

Finally, high schools are just too big. Educators made a fatal mistake 75 or so years ago when they”consolidated”small local school districts into larger units.

In the name of efficiency and uniformity they imposed size and deprived local communities of control. In the name of efficiency they built high schools for thousands of students. Large, not small, was beautiful. But they destroyed any chance of creating community and the norms that go with it, in effect inviting the misfits and the haters to work whatever evil they chose.

The sick animals run the zoo.

DEA END GREELEY