and then along came eric harris and

And Then Along Came Eric Harris And Dylan Klebold

Journalism Prof Stephen Kimber laments the treatment of Brendan Jones,

a grade 12 student at Heart Lake Secondary School in Brampton, Ont.

Jones wrote an essay as part of his final exam for his

creative-writing class. The five-page, handwritten essay was titled

Schools (sic) Out.

His equally unnamed protagonist is a 16-year-old girl who, at the end

of the story, traps her science teacher in the basement of her house,

picks up a baseball bat and says, "Sorry, Mr. Adams, but schools (sic)

out."

Brendan did not get into serious trouble for mixing up his plurals and

his possessives, or even - as his teacher was careful to note in her

teacherly way in the margins - for using cliches and violating the

inviolate "show-don't-tell" rule of composition.

No, Brendan's real crime, as it turned out, wasn't literary. It was

that he'd chosen "inappropriate subject matter."

Sure its too bad that Mr. Jones suffered through a visit from the

local police for nothing more than the crime of writing bad fiction.

Sure the odds are that he's a fine kid working out a bit of teenage

angst through creative writing.

But the world changed when the two above-named kids walked into

Columbine High School and murdered a dozen or so of their classmates,

and it was later discovered that the massacre had been prefigured in

some of their high-school creative writing projects.

Similarly, Seung-Hui Cho's propensity to violence was apparent from

his writing projects a year before 2007's Virginia Tech Massacre. If

the school had acted on these signals, who knows what might have

turned out differently?

Given events such as these, the people at Heart Lake Secondary School

would have been crazy to act in any manner other than the way they

did. You don't play around with this kind of stuff anymore.

Labels: Columbine Massacre, Creative Writing, Free Speech, Stephen