High school students across the country last week received the ultimate lesson about the value of protecting the First Amendment.

School officials in Oak Ridge, Tenn., seized 1,800 copies of the student newspaper, The Oak Leaf.

Administrators didn’t do it because the newspaper contained obscene language. They didn’t do it because it contained nude photographs. They didn’t do it because of libel concerns.

They did it because the newspaper contained an article about birth control. (And to top it off, elsewhere in the paper there were photographs of student tattoos.)

The student writer, after citing statistics about how sexually active teens are, went on to list methods of birth control and their effectiveness.

The superintendent said the article needed to be acceptable for the entire school. “We’ve got 14-year-olds that read the newspaper,” he said.

It’s also likely he has 14-year-olds in the school who are having sex. The number of Tennessee teens who had sex under the age of 13 rose from 4 percent in 2003 to 13 percent in 2004, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavioral Survey 2004.

A student newspaper that contains content about birth control is no doubt a superintendent’s worst nightmare. Seizing newspapers, however, was not the best tactic to deal with the situation. As a result of the knee-jerk censorship, the school has been in the national news and stirred up more attention than the newspaper would have received had it been distributed as usual.

That doesn’t mean student newspapers should be able to print anything and everything. Unless the newspaper operates independently of the school, it is a district publication. Oversight is necessary and there are libel concerns. That said, school officials should exercise restraint when it comes to the urge to control content. Students are the best sources of pinpointing what their peers are doing and what they are interested in. Sweeping the subject of birth control under the rug isn’t going to stop kids from being sexually active.

The birth-control piece and the tattoo photos were pulled from the edition. Fittingly enough, in place of the birth-control piece ran a review of “The Importance of Being Earnest,” the famous Oscar Wilde comedy whose underlying theme pokes fun at Victorian society for its self-righteous moralism.