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Should a 9 year old (year 5) know who Adam and Eve are?

103 replies

wubwubwub · 18/01/2024 15:46

Is this general knowledge for this age? My niece doesn't know who they are and I'm sure I did at that age. But maybe I'm old LOL.

Would I expect them to know?

OP posts:
Peteryourhorseishere · 19/01/2024 19:22

Mine does but we are religious so we’ve read genesis
together.

Some of her friends families aren’t religious at all so I probably wouldn’t expect them to.

RamblingEclectic · 19/01/2024 20:00

Possibly, depending on background, though I'd probably not be surprised either way.

It's very possible it has been covered in school, home, or somewhere else, but hasn't been retained. My kids have all read and discussed Virginia Hamilton's In The Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World, which covers Gen 1 and Gen 2 as separate tales, but how many they'll recall years on, I'm not sure. It was worth the discussions at the time regardless.

Taking the religious aspect out of it removes basic aspects of the story, as well as how it's been used throughout history and incentivised cultures.

Yes, it can be read with an eye towards a moral value, like most tales, though what moral depends on which ones you want to encourage. It can also be read just as a tale, which within the Bible may not be that interesting. It can be read in a way to discuss wider ideas of God and how deities develop - I mean, it probably has come up in school, but I wouldn't be surprised if certain teachers might do it less if they've had enough of the kids who ask the difficult questions that can arise like, if they've been taught God is all knowing, then surely he would know what they were going to do anyway... (discussing that it was written in a time before that was generally a concept given to gods is probably not going to be covered in school...).

MariaVT65 · 20/01/2024 02:48

MaybeTooLate · 19/01/2024 18:39

They’ll struggle to understand much of Western culture and history without a basic knowledge of Christianity. The Adam and Eve story is also part of the creation myth of Islam and Judaism, so pretty important. Within Christianity, the Fall is the foundation of the whole story- how sin and suffering entered the world and why Jesus had to redeem mankind. Not much else will make sense without it.

So I am a bit surprised that a 9yo doesn’t know about Adam and Eve and even more surprised to hear that people would deliberately deprive their children of an understanding of the culture they live in. It’s nothing to do with teaching it as true (in any event, few Christians in the UK take the story to be true in a historical sense).

That said, I read a statistic to my mum the other day, that some enormous percentage of adults can’t name the four Gospels, and discovered that my mum couldn’t name the Gospels and she’s a practising Christian. I think some people just aren’t very interested in knowing things.

I know the names of the 4 gospels but have no clue what’s in them. I get on perfectly fine in life.

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