Parents of students at a $41,000 per year private school in Manhattan were horrified when their children came home from school with a macabre homework assignment – write a suicide note.

According to the New York Post, the assignment was given by an English teacher named Jessica Barrish at York Prep who instructed the students to write a first-person suicide note from the perspective of a character in The Secret Life of Bees who kills herself.

“How would you justify ending your life? What reasons would you give?” the project asked.

Barrish, who is new to the school after teaching for three years in a public school, refused to comment.

The Headmaster of the school, Ronald Stewart, claims no one has complained about the assignment.

However, the Post found at least one parent who was complaining, and was willing to do so on-the-record.

“We were pretty stunned at the scope of the assignment,” said the father of a ninth-grade student at the school. “We thought this was such an outrageous assignment for a 14-year-old to get. We pay a lot of money to send our kids to the school.”

Some teachers, such as Simon Critchley, a philosophy professor at The New School university in Greenwich Village, recently taught a suicide note-writing workshop for adults and said he believed people were overblowing the incident.

“I don’t see why this is inappropriate at all. If it is, then suicide is a taboo, and I simply think we have to think rationally about our taboos,” he said. “I think it might even help students acquire a more mature and reflective approach to a hugely important topic.”

Putting suicidal ideas into kids’ heads is not a good idea, especially not when the country is experiencing a near epidemic of teen suicides. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently released a report which found that one in six high school students has seriously considered suicide with one in 12 actually attempting it.

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