Survival 101 : The days of school spirit have given way to harsh lessons in violence. Students guardedly watch how they talk, walk and dress to avoid trouble. How can we keep them safe?

Narbonne High School is Any Campus, U.S.A. Its mascot is a cowboy, and the school itself was named for a rancher who donated land to the school district more than 100 years ago. From its award-winning student newspaper to its respectable rate of college-bound seniors (30%), this Harbor City high school is anything but a stereotypical inner-city campus.

It’s a suburban spread with pine trees out front and a baseball diamond out back.

But three weeks ago, Narbonne High was less a suburban dream than a horrible nightmare. After Shazeb Andleeb, 17, who died, authorities believe, from injuries sustained in a beating by classmates (at issue was his guest list for an upcoming party), experts are debating how to keep a cruel world from invading campuses like Narbonne.

Teaching street smarts as well as the “three Rs” is one idea.

“We need to teach kids how to keep out of these situations,” said B. David Brooks, president of the Jefferson Center for Character Education in Pasadena. And there are educators who see the need to go beyond avoidance training and start teaching self-defense training.

“I think there’s no doubt that this should be done,” said Mark Slavkin, a Los Angeles Unified School District board member. “We have arrived at the day when we need to give kids hands-on skills [in protecting themselves] if someone attacks them.”

Self-defense author Judith Fein agrees: “Self-defense training ought to go into the elementary schools and the high schools.”

May was a particularly bad month for area teens.

A day before the beating, the body of 14-year-old Carl Dan Claes was found in a Lemon Heights ditch. Investigators suspect teen-agers killed the Tustin boy in a dispute over a $2,500 sound system his grandfather bought for him so he could practice break-dancing and his disc jockey hobby.

A spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department said that, after shooting the Currie Middle School student in the head with a .22-caliber pistol, two boys charged with his murder ate at a fast food restaurant.

Only last week, two Agoura Hills High School students were stabbed off campus--one died. According to investigators, the culprits are five fellow teen-agers. Prosecutors believe the motive was robbery.

Also last week, two teens were shot--one was killed. According to investigators, the teen who was killed had been asked by a gang member to explain “where he was from,” which, in street parlance, is a way of asking for someone’s gang affiliation.

Narbonne student Shazeb was recently described by classmates as a “schoolboy,” someone who got caught up in a dispute with a graffiti tagging crew. The district attorney’s office said the dispute started when the tagging crew’s members invited themselves to a party Shazeb was planning and Shazeb uninvited them. Two students have been charged with murder; four others have been arrested.

“We cannot allow ourselves to be accepting of these conditions,” Slavkin said.

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Meanwhile, the kids at Narbonne have come up with their own street curriculum, which comes as no surprise to many school officials.

“You may be surprised to find that some young people are very smart about how to survive,” said district Police Chief Wesley Mitchell.

For one, students learn to isolate themselves. “I only talk to people that I know,” said one Narbonne 10th-grader. “If you look at certain people, they’re going to tell you, ‘What are you looking at?’ ”

“I just keep to myself,” said Narbonne senior Carlos Espinoza, 18, leaning against a chain-link fence that surrounds the campus.

They also learn how to dress. “If you dress like a gang member, you’ll get hit up,” Espinoza said. “If you walk around like you’re bad, they’ll let you know who’s bad. . . . I would just keep strolling--don’t go looking for it.”

“People are always judging you by the way you dress and carry yourself,” said junior Maria Lealiiee, 16.

Students know not to stare, for fear of setting off gang members. “The thing that some girls really trip off of [get angered by] is if you look at them the wrong way,” Maria said. “So you don’t look at them and don’t say anything.”

And since gangster girls--called cholas --often wear heavy makeup, other girls take special care in the way they look so as not to attract unwanted attention.

“The way you wear your makeup, that could get you in trouble too,” Maria said.

And people on campus learn to watch their words. “Don’t be talking to people, don’t be spreading stuff around,” said senior Anjanee Mitchell, 18.

“Basically,” said district adviser Lee Saltz, “you’re looking at a society of young people that is so hardened that violence is a part of their life now.”

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Based on what he knows, USC psychology professor Adrian Raine said these street smarts are pretty smart, especially in light of an increase in what he calls “proactive aggression” on school campuses.

“More and more often troublemakers want people to see them fighting,” he said. “This violence has a clear purpose with a clear goal: increasing status, or getting money.

“Another type [of violent student] is the ‘reactive aggressive’ child,” he said. “The child doesn’t plan to be violent, but what will happen is they’ll be insulted, slighted or picked on, and will react on the spur of the moment.”

In a 1993 survey of high school seniors by the Institute for Social Research, nine out of 10 students said they often worried about crime and violence, which ranked higher than any other concern for the teen-agers. In the same survey, less than a third of the seniors said police were doing a good job protecting them.

Maria said she doesn’t feel any safer at school than on the streets. “It’s the same thing as going anywhere,” she said. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

Narbonne is a lush campus of 37.2 acres with banana trees and a flower garden out back (“one of the larger campuses in the district,” said a district representative). The 1,651-member student body is 53% Latino, 17% white, 17% black, 10% Asian and about 5% Pacific Islander.

“We have a lot of pride for our school,” said sophomore Brian Smith, 16. “It’s one of the better schools around.”

Principal Pat Donahoe said there is only so much any school can do about societal violence. “There are a lot of kids who are very angry in our society,” he said. “Sure we go after it with education, but it’s very hard to fix a child that’s been ruined by bad parenting.

“The key is in our parenting. This is a country that has abandoned good parenting.”

Donahoe has added three peacekeepers to a school police force that has grown to five. But Chief Mitchell agrees that things like stepped-up security only go so far.

“Police can make a difference in deterring and delaying a crime,” he said, “but they cannot change the culture.”

He added, however, that the school district is making changes of its own. There’s a districtwide tip line to report crimes and rumors, some campuses have anonymous tip boxes, and “communicator groups”--peer committees--are being established at schools to defuse the kinds of disputes that led to the murder of Shazeb. “Things are happening,” Mitchell said.

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In addition, there are several programs at schools like Narbonne--such as Project Impact--that teach crime prevention, drug abuse prevention and other topics to certain high-risk students. Narbonne also spends three weeks of the school year teaching ninth-graders about “nonviolent behavior.”

Clearly, teaching street smarts and crime prevention is not enough. Many educators and officials said it is time for schools to take on the role of moral torchbearer and begin to teach character.

“There is a growing movement in our country that we need to be teaching that there are rights and wrongs and consequences,” said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, “which is directly the opposite of what we teach.”

Donahoe seems to agree.

“We’re going to spend more time,” he said, “talking about values.”