But the two lads did at least have the gumption to follow through on that part of their plan which called for them to take their own lives. Harris and Klebold thus join their victims in qualifying as the latest martyrs to the greatest failed social experiment of this century, the mandatory government youth propaganda camps, still known to most of the press and public as "public schools."

We do not see private or parochial school students shooting up the joint (though the infection may yet spread there, if the strings attached to tax-funded "vouchers" succeed in turning private schools into clones of the government brand.) Neither do we see home-schoolers going mad with readily available firearms.

Nonetheless, we shall now see the government youth camps dressed up with more metal detectors and armed guards. This at least has the merit of making their true nature more obvious.

The effect of such institutions on captive adolescent males was first seen when young Native American boys were kidnapped and shipped off to "Indian schools." Their hair shorn and forbidden to speak their native tongues, cut off from the fathers and uncles who could have trained them in their tribes' traditions, that generation of Indian men grew up to have fantastic rates of alcoholism, suicide, and every other form of sociopathology.

For millennia, all around the globe, human cultures have recognized that male adolescence is a dangerous necessity. The flood of hormones that turns boys into men produces the strength, aggression, and competitiveness necessary for success in the hunt, protection of the tribe against hostile neighbors, and victory in the reproductive battle to pass on these desirable characteristics.

But left unchecked, these characteristics can also produce rape and murder -- William Golding's nightmare vision from "Lord of the Flies." Ranchers have long recognized this danger, and respond by castrating most male animals before they reach maturity.

Since that is not generally an acceptable remedy with our own children, young males in many cultures have long been taken at adolescence by their fathers and uncles into the wilderness, where they are taught to hunt and the skills of war, but also the rules that protect defenseless women and children. Often, the older men also indoctrinate them into their religious mysteries, showing the youth how to use the hallucinogenic plants of the region to achieve a religious vision, cementing his sense of his proper role in society.

By contrast, in our modern and deeply perverted manner of raising up young men in sterile rooms full of desks and chairs, such male guidance has virtually disappeared. Young men who refuse to snitch on their fellows -- observing a male code of honor -- are considered disciplinary problems. Though the schools endlessly prate about the evils of "drugs," those who resist discipline are doped up -- chemically castrated -- with Prozac, Ritalin, or any of a whole new pharmacopeia of handy nostrums guaranteed to reduce resistance or aggression.

(Look at the energy being poured into tracking where young Messrs. Harris and Klebold "got their guns." If they had used their cars to mow down 13 pedestrians, would we now be crying "Where on earth did they get those Chevrolets?" Or might someone instead be spending a little time running down early reports that Eric Harris tried to join the Marines, but may have been turned down because he had been prescribed the psychiatric drug Luvox -- fluvoxamine maleate -- with known side effects including impaired judgement? After all, we know for a fact young Kip Kinckel of Springfield, Oregon had only recently been taken off such medications when he decided to kill his parents and shoot up that welfare awards breakfast down at his school last year.)

This institutionalization of young males by age cohort was not a huge problem before 1945, when only a small minority finished high school, based on the sensible recognition that few had the vocation to go on to study Latin, Greek, and philosophy. There was little social stigma attached to a young lad leaving school shortly after reaching puberty to work the family farm or take up a trade, marry his sweetheart, and start a family.

But now the educrats have gone mad. Even as improved nutrition brings on puberty at an ever younger age, vast resources are mobilized to stigmatize as a "dropout and a loser" any lad who leaves the government behavior modification labs before age 18. (No, this has nothing to do with literacy. Alexis de Tocqueville found ours the most literate nation on earth, 30 years before the founding of the first tax-funded government school in Massachusetts.)

Herb Goldberg, Ph.D., writes in "The Hazards of Being Male": "In the public schools, the majority of students regarded as problem cases by teachers are boys. ..."

As early as elementary school, "While there is great peer pressure to act like a boy, the teacher's coveted classroom values are traditionally 'feminine' ones. The emphasis is on politeness, neatness, docility, and cleanliness, with not much approved room being given for the boy to flex his muscles. ..."

In a study of 12,000 students, "The researcher correlated masculinity scores of the boys on the California Psychological Inventory with their school grades," Dr. Goldberg reports. "She found that the higher the boy scored on the masculine scale, the lower his report card average tended to be. ..."

The result of this institutional rejection of "maleness"? "Boys show a significantly greater prevalence of ... bizarre behavior, short attention span, (and) hyperactivity."

Mr. Goldberg's book was published 22 years ago. It's not as though we weren't warned.