Yes, it was, although I suspect the average is drifting in the direction of Columbine. Your skepticism stems from the fact that you went to a reasonably normal high school. So did I. My high school did have bullying and cliquishness, but the level was fairly low. The administration tolerated all the different social groups, within certain limits. Athletes were held in high regard, but not to the extent of denying the worth of everyone else. Generally the popular kids were fairly well-rounded and didn’t really lord it over others.
Schools like Columbine have a much more extreme atmosphere. The Columbine administration really believed that those kids who were bullied deserved it because of a lack of “school spirit.” For example, the star wrestler at Columbine would shove and punch his girlfriend, in front of a teacher or hall monitor, for merely talking to an unpopular kid, with no consequences. This same guy also attacked a Jewish kid during gym class, pinned him to the floor and threatened to burn him in an oven; this continued on a regular basis until the kid’s parents transferred the kid to a different school. So in this case, it’s not that the guy was not punished “severely enough,” it’s that he was not punished <i>at all</i>, in fact he had the full support of the administration.
Remember, there are places where people view high school football as the only important thing in life. In “Columbine-like” schools, teachers willfully ignore or even encourage extreme aggression in bullies, because they really believe that bullying has a positive effect. Kids are naturally inclined to form cliques and judge others based on arbitrary and meaningless standards – but in these schools, the administration gives in to their worldview. Almost every school shooting in recent memory has occurred in just such a school.
The problem goes beyond mere youthful callousness. Schools like Columbine develop an extreme “winner-loser” culture, where the “winners” are determined by some meaningless standard that has very little to do with actual ability, and the “losers” are considered to deserve everything that happens to them, solely because of their status as “losers.” Social groups among high school kids already tend to self-organize in this manner, but when the administration itself sees the world in basically the same terms, you can get very extreme brutality.
In some sense, you are right about the resemblance of such schools to the “real world.” But this is not a good resemblance – it just means that more and more “real-world” workplaces are turning into high school, and judge the worth of their employees as human beings on high-school-like criteria. Yes, society itself adopted the “winner-loser” worldview, but this gave us rapacious and fraudulent companies, hardly the capitalist dream you’re talking about in your post. Enron also had a “winner-loser culture,” where the “winners” were the guys who drove Porsches and cooked the books, while the “losers” were the guys who wanted to do honest work every day and retire in peace. This extreme law-of-the-jungle ideology has been shoved down our collective throats over the past few decades, but it has nothing to do with the “traditional” ethos of hard work and competition. Unsurprisingly, there is an analogous trend of “rage massacres” in these kinds of workplaces as well, not just in schools.
Regarding the rest of your post, I oppose all “zero-tolerance” policies. For one thing, I don’t think they would be effective in preventing violence. Also, they are disproportionate to the infractions they punish, and they tend to target those kids who are already the victims of bullying, rather than the popular kids at the top of the ladder. As Arac already stated, such policies take the easy way out. So your attack on them doesn’t have much to do with my post. I don’t think the problem has an easy fix – the problem requires society as a whole to at least temper its attitude regarding the “winner-loser culture,” and restore a higher status to such concepts as “honest law-abiding work.”
EDIT: Regarding the “spoiled emperors,” I would argue that the bullies are also “spoiled emperors,” just in a different form. Their “success” is based entirely on their ability to satisfy the arbitrary standards of the completely artificial, isolated little world of high school. They have absolutely no ability to compete in a real, non-fraudulent company. Instead of pushing them to develop such skills, the school administration encourages them to base their lives around the warped values of high school social competitions. For this reason, many of them end up living mediocre lives after high school. Their aggression doesn’t make them able to compete because all they know how to do is humiliate others.