The entire American school system needs to be stringently reexamined from primary grades through college. If high school has turned into a seething arena of boredom and competitive tension erupting in mayhem, it's partly (as I told Interview magazine after the Columbine massacre two years ago) because modern schools have become dungeons for active young men at their most hormonally driven period of life.

Forcing restless teens of both sexes to sit like robots in regimented rows in crowded classrooms for the better part of each day is a pointless, sadistic exercise except for those with their sights on office jobs. This school system is not even 200 years old, yet most people treat it as if the burning bush floated it down from Mount Sinai. Too often, school has become a form of mental and physical oppression.

Exactly what is being taught? Certainly not wisdom or perspective on life. Can anyone honestly claim that current high school students know more about history, science, language and the arts than students 40 years ago? As for college students, the shallowness of their training in the humanities has become all too evident as graduates of the elite schools have entered the professions and the media over the past 20 years.

A gigantic, self-perpetuating school system is forcing students along a pre-professional track whether they want it or not. Perhaps as many as half the college students currently enrolled in the elite schools may not really want to be there but have just numbly followed along in the track of their parents' and peers' social expectations. They have no other options. If our pampered students have the best of all possible worlds, why are so many of them binge-drinking and anesthetizing themselves with brain-wrecking designer drugs?

As I've argued in the past, there's no way that the daughter of prosperous, successful, white upper-middle-class parents could decide to drop out of an Ivy League school in her sophomore year to get married and be a stay-at-home mom. She would be upbraided and shamed, accused of "wasting" her education and betraying her "real" talents -- and embarrassing her status-conscious parents.

Similarly, it's scarcely imaginable that the son of such a family could opt for the career of auto mechanic or trucker instead of physician, lawyer or businessman. There was a time when most high schools offered shop classes and when technical institutions gave practical preparation in the trades to non-college bound students. As the service sector expanded in the U.S. economy after World War II, such choices became fewer.

The boys who are collecting guns and fantasizing about shooting up their schools need a more constructive outlet for their energy -- which working with their hands would partly satisfy. As for the misfits who are being "bullied" into homicidal rampages, those who find school life unbearable or useless should be permitted to leave at age 14 (as was legal during the immigrant era) to try to live life on their own. Let them return to school when and if they so desire; the presence in the classroom of adult students would infinitely improve both primary and secondary education, since it's grade segregation by age that perpetuates and aggravates the tyranny of social cliques.

You say the young are far too immature to survive at 14? Well, that's proof positive that they've been infantilized by their parents in this unctuously caretaking yet flagrantly permissive culture that denies middle-class students adulthood until they are in their 20s and later -- long after their bodies are ready to mate and reproduce. The Western career system is institutionalized neurosis, elevating professional training over spiritual development and forcing the young to put emotional and physical satisfaction on painful hold.

The trades need to be revalorized. Young men and women should be encouraged to consider careers outside the effete, word-obsessed, office-bound professions. Construction, plumbing, electrical wiring, forestry, landscaping, horticulture: Such pursuits allow free movement and require a training of the body as well as the mind.

The intellectual repressiveness of the current college environment in the elite schools has been recently exposed by Salon columnist David Horowitz, whose Web base is FrontPage magazine. Controversy continues to escalate over the ad opposing reparations for slavery that Horowitz tried to place in some 50 campus newspapers. The most recent episode is the organized theft of an entire edition of the newspaper containing the ad at ultra-p.c. Brown University -- a fascist tactic that every free-speech proponent should denounce.

Of course I'm not surprised, since the most viciously intolerant campus I ever visited as a lecturer was Brown, where the humanities program has been gutted by a jejune brand of feminist theory and cultural and media studies. (There's a description of my tumultuous 1992 visit in my book "Vamps & Tramps"; see the entries for Brown University in the index.) Horowitz has conclusively demonstrated how limited the campus discourse has been on major issues since the mid-1980s. His courage in confronting personal abuse and unjust vilification must be admired. He is doing important work for authentic democracy.

As for the substance of Horowitz's claims, I agree with most of it. The campaign for apologies or reparations for slavery in the remote past is impractical and will only sharpen racial differences and tensions in the U.S. I argued this point in Salon in a 1997 column that was reprinted in "When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice," edited by Roy C. Brooks and published in 1999 by New York University Press. Too many college students are unaware of the world history of slavery as well as of the medieval African origins of the modern slave trade. Neither do they fully grasp that the noble concept of human rights and indeed the abolitionist movement itself were creations of white Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries.

On another campus issue, I was pleased by the positive reader response to my remarks on Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues," which is indoctrinating students with the hoary, victim-obsessed delusion that there is a world epidemic of violence against women (male victims of violence are conveniently ignored). Only crabbed ideologues could fail to be impressed with Christina Hoff Sommers' clarity of expression and force of mind in her Salon cover story interview with Amy Benfer about Jane Fonda's daffy gift of $12 million to another p.c. morass, Harvard University, to perpetuate the slippery gender-studies methodology of that sentimentalist, Carol Gilligan. (Couldn't Fonda's money be put to better use funding the arts?)

Over the past 20 years, thousands of women students have been fed a chaffy diet of feminist writing that wasted their time with third-rate critics, muddled theory and blatant propaganda. But feminism is institutionalized in American higher education in ways that would startle foreign observers. It began with an abuse of affirmative action and has ended with the elevation of an extraordinary number of laughable lightweights and scam artists to overpaid prominence on elite campuses from coast to coast.

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