While anyone can wander into a Montgomery County public library and browse through the newest and nastiest in online porn, students at county schools have more trouble viewing R-rated movies in class.

NBC 4 is reporting that MoCo school officials are considering doing away with a regulation that prohibits the screening of the movies to public school students, a response to complaints by parents and educators that valuable teaching tools such as “Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan” had to be removed from class syllabi. In January a 33-member working group was formed to debate the revision of a policy by which movies for class use were judged by their MPAA rating, thus preventing most high school students from seeing R-rated movies and many middle school students from seeing movies rated PG-13. Some parents, teachers and administrators would rather have students get signed permission to view certain movies, instead of having them banned altogether.

DCist is all about intellectual freedom and curiosity. More importantly, we do all feel that Hollywood has something important to offer, even to students. Honestly, I didn’t much understand physics until I was forced to watch “Speed” in class and calculate how fast that bus would have had to go to clear the gap in the freeway. And beyond allowing me to pass a class necessary for graduation, I similarly learned that Keanu Reeves simply cannot act in any role and that public transportation is too big a risk to justify its use.