Today marks the fifth anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. That day, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered twelve fellow students and a teacher before turning their guns on themselves. Had they managed to detonate the two 20-gallon propane bombs they placed in the school cafeteria, they would have killed hundreds more.

Columbine was not the first school shooting, but it did finally draw attention to long-ignored pathologies and problems among American youth and in American public schools. Schools have since learned to take threats of violence more seriously, to coordinate with local law enforcement, and to make schools more sociable places. Many now punish severe bullying, do more to reward non-athletic achievement, and give teachers and administrators wider discretion to discipline unruly students.

On the New York Times op-ed page, Pulitzer-prizewinning author Michael Chabon recently argued that these measures have gone too far. He’s not alone: The American Civil Liberties Union, among others, has applied equal and opposite force to the progress discussed above, hamstringing efforts to rein in the chaos of the American public school.

To summarize the Chabon argument: It is human nature to destroy; thus it “requires an immense act of hypocrisy to stigmatize our young adults and teenagers as agents of deviance and disorder;” imagination is the only outlet that teenagers have for their angst; to punish or otherwise discourage kids from creating disturbing “art” is “not merely the denial of teenagers’ rights in the name of their own protection, but the denial of their humanity in the name of preserving their innocence.”

It is perennially fashionable among intellectuals to picture the mentally ill and the criminal as just like anyone else. Taking satisfaction in contemplating another’s suffering and death, however, is not normal and never will be in a civilized society. As any parent knows, a child’s aggressive and violent tendencies need punishing and correcting. An adolescent who considers a story of torture a legitimate subject for a class assignment requires close attention and instruction. The cruelty lies not in stifling his supposedly heroic authenticity, but in failing to correct his antisocial behavior.

Many boys who have committed school shootings, including Harris and Klebold, fantasized openly, sometimes in class assignments, about committing acts of violence. If schools had reacted to these warning signs, they could have prevented the shootings before they happened.

Harris and Klebold made a video for class in which they executed a jock on school grounds. Michael Carneal, who opened fire on a prayer group at his high school in West Paducah, Kentucky, wrote a story for English class in which he shoots, kills, and tortures “preps” and presents their bodies to his mother for her birthday. Here’s a taste: “The first one he crucified on a metal cross that had been heated up to a glowing red temperature…. The third one he heated up a drill bit and drilled it into one of his eyes and then put a pin hole in their wrists and Chinese water tortured them while they bleed to death very slowly.” Carneal’s teacher even agreed that he could use his classmates’ real names for his assignment, provided he had their permission.

It’s hard to blame teachers for not doing anything, so long as Chabon and other intellectuals teach us to see teenage bloodlust as a normal and acceptable “acting out” of angst.

Yet schools still fail to provide the orderly atmosphere required for socialization. In a study by Public Agenda, 50 percent of public-school students said too many students get away with being tardy and not doing their homework, while 71 percent of high-school students said that there were too many disruptive students.

Harvard professor Katherine S. Newman argues persuasively in her new book on school shootings that when adults cede responsibility for laying down rules, adolescents, with their rigid hierarchies based on popularity and physical prowess, will do it for them. Students who are “different” suffer the most. Every boy who has carried out a school-rampage shooting was a loner, an outcast, a social misfit of some kind.

The brand of “tolerance” sold at schools of education and on display in public schools around the country ensures that children never learn how to behave. From insolence toward teachers, to inappropriate dress, to bloody and disturbed scribblings turned in for class credit, anything goes.

To be sure, bureaucracies overreact. Schools become hypersensitive to bullying and bad behavior, often punishing them arbitrarily. After Columbine, however, schools can no longer ignore clear signs of trouble. At the very least, they can no longer tolerate or celebrate the brutalities and cruelties conjured by the adolescent imagination.

If sick and deviant musings are “fortresses of youth,” as Chabon claims, then it’s about time we stormed the fortress.

–Sarah M. Bramwell is a freelance writer living in Denver.