"Father's Back", a famous story included in the country's Chinese textbooks for decades, has been left out of the latest edition in Hubei Province, reports Wuhan Morning Post.

The prose piece, penned by well-known writer Zhu Ziqing, has moved generations of students with the vivid description of a humble father seeing his son off at a railway station.

But the story was excluded from the most recent edition of the textbook after more than 70 per cent of students polled said it should be cut. According to a survey, they felt the father did not set a good example to young people because "he failed to abide by traffic rules and crossed railway tracks carelessly".

Members of the provincial education committee said they respected the students' opinions as the books were, after all, printed for them.

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