Teacher showing photos to kids of victorian dead children - slightly disturbing

I would have loved this teacher. The Industrial Revolution would have bored the hell out of me, Victorian death photography - now you’re talking!

It's a good illustration point of C19th industrial revolution in the UK though. New technology capturing the excess deaths - including children - in the diseased and polluted cities which powered the revolution. The photos are new machine- produced mementos mori where the old and new cultures come together: like spirit photography.

I had a student ask to do a project on 'Postmodern photography' once. Ambitious, I thought. He had a Northern Irish accent I hadn't quite tuned in to. When he brought his grisly work in, I realised the word was 'Postmortem'.

Hate to break it to you OP, but the kids have seen much worse on the Internet than a few grainy photos of dead victorian children.

In year 9 pupils are being taught to evaluate evidence of historical documents etc…. and the Victorian death photos at first glance just seem to be a family photograph, it’s only when you look at them in detail do you realise that it’s not exactly as it seems, and upon closer inspection you can see more details about the sociological economic status of the
family in the photo, and possibly from the date try to consider the potential cause of death. Do the other family members look well nourished for example? Do their hands show signs of manual labour?

As for looking at photos of industrial machinery, well it’s just picture of something with limited need to interpret the image, not least because many of the Industrial Revolution machines are housed in museums across the country where you can actually see them.

OP I think you are totally missing the point of the lesson which as all historians know is to analyse and critically assess all source material!

Can we trade problems? Leave that poor teacher alone, she probably didn't even create the powerpoint slides.

Why is it not a good idea? when I was a teen I would have loved that stuff but then again I haven’t been Molly coddled like some of the teens are today that aren’t allowed to see such gruesome things. It’s history, it’s life, once again someone who only wants to pick and choose what’s being taught to their snowflake kids

As long as your kids aren’t 8 I do t really see what the problem is 🙄

Wait till they cover the Kennedy assassination and he puts on the Zapruder footage.

I still want to know what else the teacher has done.

As a teacher I have discussed this with my kids, however, I think they instigated the conversation. I think it’s really interesting and so did they . It opens up so many opportunities for discussion/questions and sparks interest.
It’s just history. We teach them about war/killing Jews and there are photos of that. I know which I find more horrific. These parents did it to have one photo of their child. It’s sad.

I think it's fine to tell the children that the Victorians did this, but not to show them the photographs.

No it really isn't.

I thought OP was annoyed because her kid was in year 4 or something. Kid is actually in year 9 and in a history lesson being shown historical photographs…..

don’t email the school op. It’ll be embarrassing for you. It’s a history lesson. The photos are a part of history and definitely not as horrible as some photos they might see of (eg) the Second World War.

if your kid found them very difficult to cope with, perhaps recommend they don’t choose history as a GcSE option in case they have to look at more photos of things they don’t like

I worked in the death industry when I was younger and was always shocked by how modern people are so distanced from the realities of death. Its going to happen to you, me and your children. It's far more healthy to accept the reality of the situation the put your head in the sand than pretend that it's not inevitable.

DD’s teacher (y8) did 3 lessons on the slavery side of things when they did the industrial revolution, alongside many other positives and negatives.

Was the lesson literally “The camera was invented. Victorians took pictures of dead people. Look at some . The end.”?

That what you seem to imply, and if that was indeed the case, it would’ve been a pretty crappy lesson, pictures or no pictures.

If it was however a lesson about invention (the camera) , social inequalities and changes to now (how expensive having your picture taken was, that most people wouldn’t have had one in their lifetime, the memento mori mentality etc) , low life expectancies and spread of diseases due to slums, unsanitary conditions, overcrowding etc. and setting/adding context and the fact that it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows and fantastic and marvellous (like you expected) for the vast majority of people , then that would’ve been a great lesson.

I thought you were going to say year 6! Year 9 is absolutely fine. It’s interesting.

I think it's weirder to be uptight and ignorant, especially thinking you're superior when you're in the minority. I wasn't talking about the pope, I was talking about the many cultures around the world who have open caskets. Weirder to shove your loved one in a box never to see them again, but each to their own aye.

This. Can’t learn about this period in history fully without the cultural context of death being part of life more than it is now

Personally I think it’s really weird to have an open casket with 1000’s of people trooping past!

It was done because photography was so expensive people would often never have had the chance to get a photo of their loved ones and so it was a bit of a desperate last attempt at having a photo to remember them by.
Part of the history curriculum is understanding the experience of people in the past.
This is entirely appropriate, it is exploring the experience of those who lost someone in a context of financial hardship and they lengths the would go to to have a photo to remember what they looked like.
There are a lot of uncomfortable subjects taught in history and your children are not little.
I think you are being ridiculous. They are a few years away from being adults and need to be developing adult levels of critical thinking, empathy etc.

I’m surprised at people saying they were only taught the holocaust from age 14. In the 00s and 10s I was taught it pretty much every year from age 8 - disturbing photos of corpses in piles included in that teaching.

It’s a part of history. They’re not gory and it shows Victorian attitudes to death and modernity.

History tends to involve a lot of dead people OP.

14 year old me would have loved learning about that so much it might have tipped me into doing a history degree! The kids will love it.

My family bible has a couple of photos of deceased children, that was probably the only photo my ancestors had of their child.

If you are a child that is very interesting though no?

I am sure they also learn about great inventions, although probably not about the slavery that underpinned it though. If you want to get excited about something, I’d pick that.