I guess you can add Camille Paglia's name to the list of people who Mike Weiss demeans as "crackpot theorists" - here's Paglia in a new article on Salon.com:

"In other news, my reading of last month's horrific Virginia Tech massacre (which I discussed with the Sunday Times of London's perspicacious Sarah Baxter) is that it is yet another warning, after the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School, that our present educational system is an insane pressure cooker, dangerous above all for boys, with their restless physical energy.

"High school (which has become just a frantic, callow rat race for brand-name college admission) is not an eternal principle of the universe. It was invented relatively recently -- a point solidly made by Jon Savage in his interesting new book, "Teenage" (which I reviewed last weekend in the New York Times Book Review). Age segregation by grade, in my opinion, is a mechanistic atrocity that spawns ruthless social cliques, who oppress and enrage the losers in the provincial pecking order."

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2007/05/09/scarborough/index.html