In this article I explore how a professor of Educational Foundations, living in Colorado, preparing preservice classroom teachers for schools like Columbine, and raising her children in the same school district, made sense of the Columbine attack. After characterizing the peer-group culture, I illuminate the ideologies that framed the social organization of the school. By comparing Columbine to examples from educational anthropology, I make clear that racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, evangelistic, supremacist ideologies underpin mainstream schools and that these were at the heart of the Columbine attack. Although often held up as the preferred sort of U.S. school, White, middle-class-identified, academic-prep high schools might not promote the values needed to live harmoniously in a diverse society. In fact, at Columbine, the social production of difference, where so little should have existed in a school serving a remarkably homogeneous community, suggests the centrality of privilege as an ordering principle in U.S. schools.
Jocks and Weirdos at ColumbineWhat did Columbine, and other, students have to say about social peer groups in high schools? Many examples came from the media. During television newscasts, clean-cut, White, well-dressed students from the Columbine area talked about the "shooters" and characterized them as "weirdos," members of an alleged cult called "the trench coat Mafia." In newspaper and radio broadcasts, students also mentioned "Goths," "geeks," and "nerds" as kinds of "weird" students. EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 391
