Fixing Columbine

This book explores the meaning of the Columbine tragedy, as well as the nature and causes of the larger epidemic of youth dysfunction that it has come to symbolize. This epidemic is characterized by extraordinary numbers - it affects between 15 and 25 million American children - and by its manifestations, including a childhood suicide rate that by some estimates has risen 700 percent since 1960, as well as by equally pervasive and alarming increases in rates of violent behavior, depression, and anxiety.
Adopting a comparative perspective, Doriane Lambelet Coleman demonstrates that this phenomenon is unique to the United States and to this period in the country's history. She traces its origins to what she calls "a revolutionary disengagement from our children, particularly from their irreducible need for involved parenting, positive peer relationships, and otherwise healthy real and virtual environments."
These conclusions provide the springboard for Coleman's insightful discussion of how American law and political theory, with their rigidly narrow focus on individual liberty have contributed to the creation of the epidemic, and stand as largely immutable obstacles to any comprehensive and immediate cure. Coleman concludes with the provocative suggestion that the public schools, with their historically communitarian focus on teaching the children both personally rewarding and externally responsible values, might provide a partial solution, particularly if the necessary curriculum reform were federalized to assure that all American children could benefit from its protections.

Doriane Lambelet Coleman teaches at Duke Law School.