Introduction
Introduction
A growing number of shootings involving students in small-town and suburban schools has experts convinced that school violence is no longer just a big-city phenomenon. While some experts blame a breakdown in school discipline, others point to drugs and gangs. And some say schools merely reflect an increasingly violent society, whose attitudes are passed on through television and movies to children who lack the traditional counterweights of parental guidance, community kinship or religion. As violence mounts, many teachers and criminologists argue for a crackdown on hard-core troublemakers through toughened expulsion policies. But other educators believe that schools must take on the basic task of teaching students to resolve conflicts peacefully -- a lesson that many children no longer seem to receive at home.