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Students can be suspended for a lot of odd reasons these days — wearing “objectionable” T-shirts, cross-dressing for prom, planning elaborate senior pranks — but a principal at a Catholic high school in Sparta, New Jersey, has added another offense to the list: having a blog.

Ok, stop. I don’t care if this is a private school or not, this is absolutely ludicrous. Who is this guy to say that none of the students at his school can express themselves through a website? I can understand if they want to limit comments made about the school or its staff, and it would be perfectly appropriate to hand out school punishments for violations in that regard. But to say that you can’t even have a blog because of the possibility of exposure to the bad people of the world…give me a break. That’s like saying you should never go outside because there’s a possibility you’ll get a cold that leads to fatal pneumonia. No one can live their whole life inside a box.

What really gets me is that this is an issue for parents, not the school principle. It’s the parents responsibility to make sure they know what information their child is putting out on the web, and to teach them what is appropriate and what is not. The school can certainly teach guidelines (and they should), but for a kid to face suspension simply because he writes his thoughts online is shameful. A school trying to instill values into its students for home life is one thing, but actually trying to regulate home life is something altogether different and completely unacceptable.

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