MARIJUANA AND THE SPIRIT OF INQUIRY

When a 15-year-old Saskatchewan boy expressed doubts to his friends
that marijuana is as harmful as his high school portrayed it to be,
the school responded with a memorable lesson: Being skeptical of
authority can be dangerous. The boy was suspended, the RCMP were
called in and at one point the boy's entire school was locked down.
The events were a terrific real-life example of the power of questions
to unsettle.

Something more important than the risks of marijuana is at stake here.
Schools in a democracy need to teach democratic values. Anything they
teach about - sex education, the dangers of drugs, even democracy
itself - should fit within the democratic framework. Schools are not
doing that if they're trying to snuff out the spirit of inquiry.

This was not a case of a teenager who wishes merely to disrupt, and
there is no evidence that he was trying to sell drugs. Kieran King
seems to have come by his doubts honestly. Nineteen years ago, his
mother's husband and a daughter were killed by a drunk driver.
Skeptical about the classroom lesson on the dangers of cannabis, he
began looking at the risks of alcohol and tobacco, and told his peers
that cannabis was the least dangerous of the three. A fellow student
at Wawota Parkland School in Wawota, Sask., complained to principal
Susan Wilson, who called Kieran's mother and expressed concern that he
was advocating drug use. She threatened to call the police if it
happened again.

At this point Kieran took a provocative step. With the help of the
Saskatchewan Marijuana Party, he planned an 11 a.m. walkout by the
students in support of free speech. A civil-liberties group would have
been a better choice; the presence of the pro-marijuana party might
have made people wonder if he was more interested in the drug than in
free speech. But while Wawota had the right to punish students who
walked out, its pre-emptive approach was heavy-handed. It first tried
to bar the doors, and when Kieran and a handful of others slipped out,
it ordered the school locked down and called in the RCMP. It asked the
RCMP to help it assess the threat posed by Kieran to the student body.

This is ridiculous stuff. Wawota forgot its pedagogical purpose; it
acted the way a tyranny acts when challenged. While it has a duty to
protect its students, they do not seem to have been at any risk.
Lockdowns, a useful post-Columbine innovation in schools, are
excessive when applied to 15-year-olds trying to express a point of
view in a safe and peaceful way. Violating students' rights is a poor
way to teach them respect for rules.

The school was not finished. It suspended Kieran and his brother for
three days, a suspension that cost Kieran a chance to write the early
exams he had arranged for. (He was finishing the school year early to
head to study Mandarin in China.) The zeros he received on his exams
bring his marks down from A's to D's. The penalty is too harsh for the
offence.

A school that believes in a student's right to ask honestly held
questions would have addressed those questions. The classroom session
that followed might have been far more penetrating and memorable than
the initial lesson on drugs the students had received. Instead, Wawota
wound up inadvertently providing its students with a lesson in the
risks of dissent.