I shouldn’t be surprised when I read stories like this, but they still tick me off.  A high school in New Rochelle, New York has torn out several pages of the novel Girl Interrupted, because it’s sexually explicit.

The New Rochelle schools had already denounced the vandalism targeting “Girl, Interrupted” by Susanna Kaysen, about her stay in a Massachusetts mental hospital. Superintendent Richard Organisciak has since followed that by announcing plans to “undertake a review of our policy and practices as they relate to the selection of materials in all formats.”

In addition, the New Rochelle High School English Department – where the decision to censor the book was made in 2004 – has issued a statement calling the decision “regrettable.”

The torn-out pages came to light when students in a film class this year were assigned to compare the book with the 1999 film version, which stars Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie.

Among the students who noticed the excised pages was the son of Robert Cox, who writes the blog, “New Rochelle’s Talk of the Sound.”

Cox e-mailed the English department chairwoman, who responded that the material was torn from the books because it was “of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students.”

Cox says he blogged about the torn-out pages when his later e-mails to the principal and superintendent went unanswered. The blog brought public attention and the district announced its disapproval.

Yes, but only after it brought public attention to the matter.  Before that, the kid couldn’t get anyone at the school to answer his questions about why it happened in the first place.

The book’s publisher, Vintage Books, denounced the censorship but said the district’s decision to replace all the torn copies was “a satisfactory redress of the situation.”

Why are we tearing out material from novels?  The sexual nature of the novel is a large part of who this woman became.  Erasing part of her life, simply because you are too prudish to teach or read it is ridiculous.  If this book is too explicit, then why teach it at all?  Find something else to teach so that you can continue to pretend that high schoolers know nothing about this topic and are good, innocent, little children.