After a school year with 193 forced closings, the last Legislature appointed a study commission to make recommendations on dealing with bomb threats and other potential acts of violence in Maine schools. Last month, the Criminal Justice Committee of the current Legislature rejected the entire package of recommendations, with some members scolding school administrators for overreacting. As if on cue, an outbreak of bomb threats and other potential acts of violence swept the state.

No sooner did it become widely accepted that students who threaten violence against their classmates are not bullies but instead are the victims of bullying than an 11-year-old boy here in Maine fires a pistol in a school restroom and promptly tells authorities he’d brought the gun to school because he was being bullied. He says this in the same matter-of-fact way one might explain wearing boots because it was raining.

After three bomb threats in three weeks, one of Maine’s high-achieving high schools closes for a couple of days and then reopens after installing a metal detector on loan from another top Maine high school. The news that Maine high schools even have metal detectors to loan is greeted not with a shudder but a shrug.

Maine certainly is not the only state senselessly stumbling through this problem. In fact, clueless desperation regarding school violence may be the one thing all 50 states have in common. That’s why it was encouraging to read in Tuesday’s New York Times an interview with Dr. Elliot Aronson.

Dr. Aronson is a social psychologist, author and professor emeritus at the University of California. This sounds awfully ivory tower, but his work is very practical. In his latest book, “Nobody Left to Hate: Teaching Compassion After Columbine,” he does not merely describe how society shapes human behavior, but how understanding that process can help solve real-world problems, like bigotry and violence.

It has been precisely 30 years since Dr. Aronson began developing what he now calls the “jigsaw” classroom, an innovation born of dire necessity. In 1971, he was teaching at the University of Texas at Austin and the city’s public schools were in a crisis – court-ordered school desegregation had led to riots among black, Hispanic and white students.

He and some of his graduate students quickly devised a cooperative learning technique in which students – fourth through sixth grades – were placed in small, racially mixed groups to work on specific lessons. Each student had a particular component to research and to teach, the success of the entire group on the eventual exam depended upon the degree of cooperation. This technique was used only for part of the school day and only for classes, such as history or literature. The initial resentment of being forced together soon faded; within just a few weeks the researchers observed students of different races playing together at recess.

From that start, Dr. Aronson has come to believe that the root cause of school violence is the cliquish atmosphere, a hierarchy of taunting and teasing that can make as much as 40 percent of a school’s students feel rejected and humiliated – some suffer in silence, some commit or contemplate suicide, some lash out.

One of Dr. Aronson’s more alarming findings is that the most relentless and cruel taunting is done not by the “top” echelon, the most popular clique, but by the “second tier” students who do it both to identify with the elite and to avoid being lumped in with the outcasts.

It’s a vicious cycle of attack or be attacked – the “jigsaw” classroom offers a way out. One more interesting point Dr. Aronson makes: The work of social psychologists is subject to the same rigorous standards as other fields of scientific research, its practical applications are the basis of everything from the advertising industry to political campaigns, yet in something as important as creating civil and safe schools, it is dismissed as academic theorizing. Learn more at www.jigsaw.net – it helps makes sense of something that otherwise makes no sense at all.