Mid-afternoon, Tuesday, March 24. A fire alarm sounds. Teachers and students evacuate the school as had been practiced. Pop-pop-pop. Gunfire rings out. Children and teachers drop to the ground. Impressed, the audience cheers. Until they realize that it wasn't a dramatization. A few students had just applauded the death of their friends and a teacher!

This horrific punctuation to a real-life tragedy hasn't been discussed much in the media. John Kifner wrote about it in last Friday's (Mar. 27) New York Times. Arkansas talk radio has been abuzz about it. Little has been said on the national level.

How could students applaud the death of their classmates? Because our educational system has trained them to do so. It has practiced so many psychological games on our youngsters, that they no longer can discern reality from a dramatization. Neither do they look to adults for advice and counsel. They have been trained to take solutions into their own hands. And two young boys did exactly that. 

Don't blame guns for this. Don't blame the Southern hunting culture. Don't blame broken families. Don't blame innate juvenile cruelty either. Yes, they all have some role. But the onus falls to our education system. We are reaping the seeds they have sown for nearly 100 years. 

Blame Jean Jacques-Rousseau and John Dewey for their promotion of child-centered learning. Blame the NEA for having made manifest its 1918 Cardinal Principles. Blame the Clinton administration, the 103rd Congress, and the USDOEd for Goals 2000, peer remediation, conflict resolution and collaborative learning.

They have co-conspirators. Blame the courts for their absurd rulings nullifying parental and adult authority. Blame the pop-psychologists for offering up the pap that judges and educators actually swallow.

A week before the Jonesboro tragedy a Seattle-area psychologist warned that we have created a generation of Lords of the Flies.Our government, especially public education, has taught our children to reject parental guidance. Immature kids have been trained to look to one another for help in times of personal crisis.

Courts rule that parents have no say in decisions related to their child's pregnancy. In some states, career guidance and academic counseling session with students are treated with physician-patient confidentiality.Parents are precluded from knowing what went on.

Gynecological exams and cavity searches are conducted absent parental consent, with no attendant present. Parents are denied access to student portfolios and performance assessments. Students are pulled out of class for group sessions, and are told not to tell their parents. Administrators get livid when parents demand to know what was discussed, and what records were kept.

Child abuse laws are contorted in the most absurd manner. Parents are threatened with child endangerment when they resist state usurpation of their rights and responsibilities. As intrusive as these things are, they just set the stage for the state's dirty work -- mind games -- to begin.

Administrators and teachers chide parental views as "old-fashioned" and not sufficiently "progressive." When on-campus tension exists, the kids are brought in for conflict resolution therapy. Yes, it's therapy. Real issues are glossed over with politically correct banalities. The real issues are not addressed, only suppressed. They fester and smolder beneath the surface.

The students are taught that consensus is the order of the day. There must be no strife-inducing dissension. Individualism is subordinated to group- think. Principles are capitulated in the name of harmony.

Schools go to great lengths to promote consensus, collaboration and group think. Then, ironically, we turn around and conduct realistic psycho-dramas to counteract the deleterious effects of peer pressure. They attempt to cancel the negative consequences of one set of mind games with another set.

The very adults who have trained these youngsters to not be assertive, to not stand their ground on principles, to not show signs of individualism, can't understand how a Jonesboro or Paducah can happen.

Well, zero tolerance laws won't fix it. Gun control won't help. More conflict resolution won't stop it. More training in how to recognize the tell-tale signs won't end it. They're but mere band-aids.

The only thing that will help is to quit training our youngsters to look to each other when serious troubles exist. Instead of breeding Lords of the Flies, train them to ask their parents. Or consult their clergy. Or find a teacher or coach in whom they have confidence. Get peer remediation out of our schools.

Get conflict resolution out, too. This namby-pamby feel-good psychobabble, politically correct nonsense pushes problems down so deep that the only way they can be finally resolved is via a volcanic eruption. Conflict resolution doesn't deter violence, it defers and amplifies it.

Minors don't have full rights under the law because they aren't mature enough to deal with life's tougher issues. Why train the immature to seek help from the inexperienced under duress? It's a formula for failure.

I am deeply saddened about the Jonesboro tragedy. But I am horrified that we have created a generation so detached that they applaud a mass murder because they can not tell the difference between what is real and what is not.

While we hotly debate the academic issues of illiteracy and innumeracy, we also have to deal with the non-academic programs in our schools that are fostering a generation of Lords of the Flies.

F.A. Hayek once wrote that the real advantage of competition is that it punishes foolish ideas. Public education, having no real competition, has grown replete with foolish ideas. We have to winnow out and punish these foolish ideas.

As I see it, competition is our only real hope that this will ever happen.