Down with the system. (Score 3)

Actually, VV came much closer to the true problem than Katz did.
In comparing schools to prisons they were close to the truth and
missed only by not exploring the comparison more closely. "Modern"
schools are factories, factories to mill the unique edges, distinctive
extrusions, and characteristic cravasses from our individualities.

"The purpose of public education is to teach reflexive obedience
to arbitrary authority", I tell my daughters. It began with military
training in central Europe, was adopted and expanded upon as a tool
of political inculcation by British socialists and was siezed upon
and remolded by American industrialists in the image of the factories
for which they were to produce refined ore (workers!).

Schools don't harbor a repressive social order by accident -
production of repressive/suppressive social order is their very purpose.
They exist not so much to teach math/history/language etc. as that we
must all get up at a certain time, accept an external committments of
our time, obey a variety of strangers and accept their authority based
upon the social structure, limit our "freedom of speech" to acceptable
norms, follow the dress code and others I've probably been to thoroughly
"mainstreamed" myself to recognise. And it is no accident that those
who most exemplify social order and obedience - the players of team
sports - are the exhalted of this microcosm.

Nor is it an accident that those who don't/can't fit are handled most
roughly. The horrors visited upon the physically inept are bad enough,
but the Geek Tragedy arises from the fact that the nominal purpose of
mass education - edification of the intellect - has little to do with
its real purpose. By definition the intelligent have access to a larger
conceptual space than the normals and are thus more likely to cross
into expressions and behaviors which the consumer/worker factory finds
unacceptable, and hence must restrain coercively and "taught" not
to repeat.

While industrial economics ruled, this system worked well enough:
the socially successful in school were "successful" in life enough to
reinforce the school social system in partly self fufilling feedback.
Now as factory industrialism nears extinction it doesn't work so well.

The nose-picking dork with the palm-top on his belt that the jock
beats up on after school may be not just the jock's boss a few years after
school, but could be the jock's father's boss in a part time job tomorrow.
Of course the sports and poms recognise this inversion of the natural order
and vent their despair with renewed hostility.

Meanwhile perceptive and interactive space (cable, vcr, games, inet)
have exploded in the last decade. Those who may be socially maladroit
in meat space can often find ego validtion in conceptual space at a point
so far removed from mundane conceptual space that feedback from the
school social milieu will more likely be percieved as arbitrary sadism
than a directional inducement. Likewise normal conceptual space has
expanded and thus been diluted and diffused to the point where the
elite of the worker/consumer factory school are often at a disadvantage
to, and outperformed by the pasty fat kid who's on the computer all day.

But schools go on - they have an embedded politically powerful
bureaucracy to ensure it - pretending that they can produce cohort after
another of ample worker/consumer droids for factory jobs which no longer
exist, in ever larger, more expensive factory schools.

The largest single problem manifest at Littleton is not violence in
games or movies, not guns, not the clash of geeks and jocks, gays and
homophobes, not social angst and alienation nor hatred and intolerance
themselves. The problem lies in a state sponsored and backed system
of institutionalized homogenization of young minds; confining an ever
more socially and intellectually divergent group into unintended and
often unwilling contact, conflict and competition while imposing an
external social order which no longer fits the real world.