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

I'm sure he's only too interested to hear about it - he must hear all sorts with prayer!

I did nearly suggest God 🤣

😆 It might be good to look and see that for the most part, they aren’t remotely gruesome or distressing!

OP actually wrote at the beginning of the thread about the poignancy of the depicted parents’ grief. But it might actually be quite good for Y9 kids to see that. One aspect of showing them some of these photographs might be the “ew how weird the Victorians were” factor. But another side of it might actually to see, via a window into the past, the real love and grief and mourning these real people had for their deceased children and loved ones.

This kind of private, intimate, domestic history of children and motherhood/parenthood and grief, as I said upthread, is often left out of the “great men and their machines”, Great Exhibition/“Jolly old British Empire” type of history that traditionally focused on Brunel and the railways and industrialisation. Being able to witness, even 160 years later, these private photographic moments of bereavement and introspection is a good and thoughtful correlative to that.

Not really?

You heavily implied it was someone higher up in school, and that the teacher you're 'shaking and can't sleep' over was going to be removed.

Who were you speaking to if not someone higher up in school?

Higher up where? Council? Government? God??

I recently went with a primary school class to Manchester Museum (Y4). The vast majority were absolutely fascinated to see the unwrapped mummified remains of Asru and it was very sensitively handled by the staff who talked to the kids about respect and how the museum would do things differently now. They also asked children to pick their favourite object and made it clear they couldn’t pick Asru as she was a person not an object. No parents had an issue about the children being taken to see this despite it being much more “real” than a photograph and the kids being a lot younger.

Out of interest, what would your view be on your children seeing this OP?

Probably, but all professionalism has its limits when the complaints are your level of ridiculous and unwarranted.

Well that explains everything 😒

Higher up where? The "Mad Mom's Club?"

You’d better put a massive trigger warning on this - OP won’t sleep for a month!!

But OP knows more than this teacher, and all teachers, and historians...

Why? I find it actually very interesting. Would I be happy to have it shown to a 5 year old, no but 14? Really? And they wonder why the children today can’t handle modern life. My children studied the holocaust younger than 13 and honestly not a lot gets worse than that.

I find it pretty egregious to be complaining about a teacher who is just teaching some quite well known bits of cultural history, in order to interest kids in the broader period they’re studying.

OP has come back to be extra unreasonable today it seems

It's very telling that multiple people have asked who this 'higher up' was at the school that she spoke to, and she hasn't returned...

@Friendlynortherner I’m a nineteenth century historian. There are plenty of contemporary sources of these, especially from France and America - including adverts by commercial photographers who offered postmortem photography services, plus contemporary comment, often by the photographers themselves, on their methods of posing subjects, etc.

Discounting the Internet ones that are actually photographs of living people, there are plenty of examples where the subjects are posed explicitly as dead; and in America, it was especially common to depict the subject in a coffin or casket. There are probably more surviving examples of postmortem photography in American collections because the practice continued in frontier America for some time after it had passed its popularity in Europe (as documented by the folk historian Michael Lesy in the 1970s).

A lot of the actual early photographs themselves are difficult to obtain since they were types of physical (ie. non-negatives/not easily copy able) photography, such as cased daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes, commissioned for private mourning and often now held in private collections (however, I’ve copied an example below held in the Met, by Alphonse Le Blondel, a well known French studio photographer of the mid-1800s).

There is also a lot of academic work on this topic going back decades now. Obviously, much of it (and the links to sources) are in academic monographs and libraries difficult to access for non-scholars, but, just for a start, take a look at these open-access resources. The Patrizia Munforte article, the next to last link below, also discusses in depth the ambivalence of not knowing whether an image is a “true” postmortem photograph or not.

https://clements.umich.edu/exhibit/death-in-early-america/ - this resource from U of Michigan is especially good, with visual examples

https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/6241/1/6241.pdf - this article includes quotations from contemporary photographers on the practice

The Yale Review | Lili Hamlyn: "Camera Mortis"

Alphonse Le Blondel | [Postmortem] | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/114469/1/The%20Body%20of%20Ambivalence.%20The%20'Alive,%20Yet%20Dead'%20Portrait%20in%20the%20Nineteenth%20Century.pdf

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odbetd/ws/sendfile/send?accession=osu1144936478&disposition=inline

Wait until they start learning about the Holocaust! Come on OP, these kids are teens. Death is on the news ALOT right now!

Oh, give over

Why?
They're 13 and 14 year olds, not primary school aged

This is inappropriate. Complain to the Head Teacher.

So who did you speak to?? You said you spoke to someone at the school who was equally as concerned as you - but it wasn't SLT????

They are called memento mori. It's history, get over it. This is why she showed them to the kids. To stop ignorance and teach.

Then who on earth did you speak to?

There is no way the entire lesson was on the photos.

I'm sure they eye rolled and sighed as you left. 🙄
You don't have to agree with everything that the teacher decides to use in lessons. You certainly don't try to destroy their career unless it is gross misconduct.
How will your teenage DC cope in life without your barricades shielding them.

Not the parents with legitimate and sensible concerns and complaints. Just the parents who think they know best even when their comments and concerns are a little on the unhinged side. Sometimes saying “yes, of course, you’re right,” with a nod and a smile does the job quicker than arguing with someone who can’t be reasoned with.

Your chief complaint here is that a history teacher showed a class pictures of something historic, which lots of people on this thread have told you is unreasonable. You have asked for advice and refused to engage with any viewpoint different from your own. You also believe yourself to know the children, the curriculum and how to engage the children better than their teacher does. I honestly can’t decide if you are bored and goady or just have a massively over inflated ego.