to be upset with what my child is learning at school / WWYD?

[IteotYEARawki]

My older boy is 5 and in his 3rd term of school so far (year 1).

He has learned that Guy Fawkes was hung, drawn, quartered and then burned on a bonfire.

That hundreds of people had their heads chopped off with a guillotine.

And the latest - that Anne Franks hid from the SS behind a bookcase, that people were marched off to concentration camps and that thousands, including children, were killed by gassing. And that the children were told they were going to have a shower when they were taken to the gas chamber.

There has been a museum display on Anne Franks & her life in town which was advertised on the radio - DS1 overheard it and started telling us all that he'd learned about it at school. Apparently his teacher has visited a concentration camp and described it, including the rooms full of boxes of bones.

I don't deny that history needs to be taught and that the Holocaust is part of it. But this graphic detail, at 5?

We already had a chat with his teacher after the Guy Fawkes thing. I don't think I'm being precious in not wanting him exposed to this stuff so soon. It'll take about 3-4 months for him to process through it all and then we'll have inconsolable crying at night while the horror hits him.

AIBU? Should we talk to his teacher again, or chat with the principal?

I would have thought that the Titanic was general knowledge and that it just happened so long ago that it wasn't frightening-it happened before the time of their grandparents and to a 5 yr old a parent is 'from the olden days'. When I was at school, and I am older than the teacher, we used to sing-

' Oh the built the ship Titanic to sail the ocean blue, and they thought they had a ship that the water wouldn't go through, but the Lord's Almighty Hand said that ship would never land. It was sad when the great ship went down...

(Chorus)
It was sad, SO SAD! It was sad, SO VERY SAD!
It was sad when the great ship went down to the bottom of the (husbands and wives,and little children lost their lives!) It was sad when the great ship went down'

The words do actually get worse! I don't really think that we thought much about it and my grandparents were alive when it happened. It was all 'the olden days'.

I agree that the Holocaust was different but seeing that the majority had been taken to the Anne Frank exhibition by their parents and were discussing it, it was only sensible of the teacher to discuss it.

Most of our history is pretty distressing. Year 2 do the Great Fire in 1666 without having nightmares.

The Horrid Histories do well because DCs love them.

I'm actually pleased that I was a very good reader and could access stuff for myself if parents are going to get so protective that you can't be told that a ship hit an iceberg in 1912-especially when it is bound to crop up a lot next April and be difficult to avoid.

Ime some children are very sensitive and quite intellligent enough to understand that horrors are horrors at an early age, so I can credit the OP.

Compared to some other countries, early British history lessons do seem to focus on the gory and grim: there is a greater cultural assumption that this is something necessary to hold children's attention. It's not the only way: when I was at school in Sweden, we started with the Stone Age (building models of barrows and mesolithic villages) and progressed to the Middle Ages, reaching the Renaissance around Yr 4. The focus was far more on ways of life than on individual disasters such as the Titanic or the Fire of London. From what I hear from my nephews, this is still the same.

The thing that strikes me about my children's history lessons is that they are so sensational in the selection of material: the sinking of the Titanic is given greater weight than the invention of agriculture and children are left with the impression that it must have been one of the key events in history. There is a definite assumption that only disaster will hold their attention.

We learned about the Holocaust very throroughly, but at an older age. If, as other posters say, most children are too young to take it in anyway, it would make more sense to me to teach them something they can take in.

It was the level of detail - actually it was that he knew children were told they were going to have a shower when they were put into the gas chambers that really got to me

I can't imagine that the teacher would have brought it up herself, she was reacting to what they had found out at the exhibition that they had been taken to.
I am surprised that parents took DCs so young. I went to the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam when I was about 22yrs and it sticks in my mind always-I don't think that you would want to be younger than 11yrs, and probably about 13/14yrs. However-the teacher was only reacting after they had been taken by their parents.

I am a fan of Horrible Histories as are my kids (8 and 4) so you'd think I'd be all for the 'horrible' facts to be taught to young children, and I'm not.

5 year old are very different from each other and haven't all yet learned to process upsetting/graphic news and views, or cope with them.

I think 5 is far too young to go into such detail in school. I am happy for my children to love the grusome side of history but I can control it and know that they are not upset by it. (They LOVE blood, guts and gore stories but can't cope as well with stories of unkindness!)

I use their interest in the gory to talk to them about the wider picture, I must admit I agree with cory that the sensational side of history seems to be taught more than the important turning points in history that got us where we are now... that's the history I am trying to introduce to my children (I'm no historian, but their Uncle is an Archeologist) but the gory stuff IS a useful tool as a starting point to avid interest! (For MY kids)

The idea that "most of our history is distressing" surely depends on who selects the material that is considered to belong to "our history"?

I felt mildly irritated when I picked up ds' book on Life in the Medieval Town and found that about half of the book was given over to the bubonic plague. The bubonic plague in the 14th century lasted a couple of years. No doubt it was terribly distressing at the time, but as generations of medieval people lived without ever having heard of it it can hardly be said to sum up "Life in the Middle Ages". It's a bit as if somebody wrote a book about Life in the 20th century and concentrated on the Spanish flu to the exclusion of the developments in music and nutrition and women's status and all the other massive changes that happened during the rest of the century.

The impression left by most children's books on Tudor England is that the most common cause of death was by beheading.

What it does is leaving children with the impression that people in the past weren't really real people who had ordinary lives: they were funny people who were having their heads chopped off all the time or dying in other gory ways.

I am not saying I would like the bubonic plague covered up but I would like to see more of a balance. I know many children love Horrid Histories, but we also loved our model mesolithic village.

Exactly cory-my point was that you can easily find distressing material. You don't have to! I don't know who decided that YR2 were going to do Fire of London and Florence Nightingale. Before national curriculum you used to get a much broader spread. I used to start with the Stone Age, because of the area we lived in.

I think they actually find this sort of stuff a lot more distressing when they are iolder than at 5.

Exactly-I didn't appreciate quite what 'hung, drawn and quartered' meant until I was about 17yrs.

I think 5 is a bit too young to be learning about the Holocaust. Horrible histories are aimed at the over 8's.