To not want my daughter looking at image of concentration camps

[Coffeeessential]

My daughter has just started Yr 5, and is studying World War 2 this year. She was already having difficulty coping with the subject as she is so sensitive, but I saw nothing wrong with her being given the basic facts as long as there was not too much detail - She's only nine after all.
When she came home very quiet yesterday afternoon, she told me that the class had been looking at online images of 'Jews in concentration camps', and I am furious. While I understand that we cannot protect children from the world forever, surely nine is too young to even begin comprehending such terrible images?
I would appreciate other people's opinions, before I go crashing into the Headmaster's office!

I don't think getting children to google images of the holocaust is a way of stopping genocide - it's just showing them horrific pictures from a long time ago, about people from another country.

I think getting children to learn about genocide and think through the issues together so that they can articulate ideas is far more valuable. They need to be able to think through this stuff, ask questions and understand context before we try to shock them with pictures of piles of bodies.

Yeah I'm not sure why Goodnight Mr Tom is any better than carefully selected pics of the camps.

The people saying suck it up, do you realised that the parents actually tried everything they could at the time to protect their children about what was happening especially the little ones.

You can talk about it in primary, show some selected pictures if you want, but not let them google randomly about the subject.

Pompeii's part which is restricted is the "statues" of people dying i.e dead person solidified in ash for eternity.

Like valium I think that I would be more worried about children who weren't upset or at least not disturbed at all.

And yes I do shield my children from certain news stories - child abuse, shopping mall massacres - there's a reason why we have a TV watershed, why news programmes warn about graphic images, it's because they have an effect on everyone and especially on children.

My friend's six year old appeared very knowledgeable about a recent child abuse/abduction story and I was at that.

I would probably take it up with the school about the unsupervised googling of images. That is not appropriate regardless of my personal belief that 9 is not too young to introduce some of it (although in reality I'd probably also discourage the viewing of the more disturbing photos).

These terrible things happened to nine year olds and younger, Jewish and non-Jewish.

ukatlast it's part of the book as Michelle Magorian wrote it. The baby wasn't stillborn though. The actual events leading up to that scene are a bit worse than that.

I have read the book, but not seen the film, to be clear. The essential plot is that the evacuation brings an unhappy widower (his wife died in pregnancy or childbirth) and the child of a woman with severe untreated mental illness together, . The moral is that a family is people who love each other and want to look after each other.

The cupboard scene, which occurs after the mother demands he go back to London, after finding out his best friend in the village is a Jewish evacuee, is when we find out the exact depth of the problems at home. The book is quite complex: it shows evacuees in the village who are mistreated as well as the boy and Mr Tom.

ubik I shield dd too from the news and graphic images on the front of newspapers.

Unsupervised google searches for "concentration camp" images for 9 yr olds is totally unprofessional imo
exhibit a Boer War

There are tons of deeply upsetting images of hanged and tortured inmates hosted on websites spouting pro nazism too.
I would be pretty hacked off and I would be raising my concerns pretty strongly.

I took my DC to Pompeii last year, aged 8,7, and 2. No part of it was restricted. (didn't take them to the brothels obv!) My eldest was fascinated and asked a lot of questions, but understood that sometimes things happen that we can't control. This was after seeing the entombed bodies.

Holocaust images are sometimes necessary as an accompaniment to teaching, but I wouldn't have left yr 5 children to google them!

I remember being in year 5 (so would have been aged 8) and we watched a video about world war 2 and concentration camps. Was sitting with my friend (crossed legged on the floor) and she said 'if I was a Jew I would have taken my gas mask into the chamber' I told her she was silly and that they wouldn't have been allowed. I got sent out for talking

I think it is an important part of history and I don't remember being traumatised by it. I remember being shocked that a human being would treat others in such a horrible way. If it is part of the curriculum then I'm not sure much would get done if you complained to the head. It also doesn't seem as though the curriculum has changed much in 20-odd years.

We have lost close family in the holocaust. That's going to be hard to explain to ds. He is only 4 now, but is bound to start asking at least when family trees are discussed at school.

I have been to many concentration camps and the pictures are distressing. I think vetted pictures at age 9 are fine. While people are capable of forgetting and sheer denial, educating our children from around 9 years old is only desirable. Some talking can be done even earlier. More explicit content/videos can be shown in secondary at e.g. 13 years old.

If you cannot cope with those type of images yourself I think you may pass that sort of sensitivity on to your children because they will see you recoil or be upset by other things too.

Many 9 year olds could cope very well with it, especially if the subject was handled carefully and well by their teacher.
However, you should be able to talk to your child about it and reassure them if it worries them.
Its certainly better taught in a controlled lesson than what some 9 year old children are accessing on the internet on their own or being shown by more worldly friends!

Also agree that more recent mass mursers should be equally discussed, so that it's not just a "history" thing..

I really don't think that a group of 9 and 10 years should have been left to google images of concentration camps. The teacher should have preselected a range of images to dicuss with the class.
While it is useful to teach children how to effectively research topics using the internet - this is not the subject and these are not the images to use.

So how exactly do you 'reassure' children about the Holocaust? How does a 9 year old who doesn't have too much 'sensitivity' 'cope very well' with images of genocide.

They all lived happily ever after? No genocides ever happened afterwards?

(Yes, I know this sounds sarky. But if I were a KS2 teacher I'd not find it easy to do either of those things.)

Fraumoose - I guess that is why you have to help children to reach a opinion on what happened - you want them to think - that's was dreadful, I would not go along with that.

Obviously when you get into teenage years you can appreciate the wider social and political context of the holocaust and understand that genicide continues and that sometimes there is just no explanation

I feel here the issue is unsupervised use of the Internet and Google full stop, that must surely be against the school IT policy.

As to the question of teaching about WW2 atrocities, WW1 battles and more recent conflicts/genocide I feel, yes, children must be taught about these major historical events and shaming parts of human behaviour in very modern history.

Images should be used to support this learning, war photography is essential to our understanding of these events. As is the question of how often many of these images were and are ignored.

As someone who was born just after the war I do remember in the 50s (when we eventually got a tv) seeing films which the Allies took when they liberated the concentration camps. At that time, of course, it was all very close to home as there were numerous badly disfigured servicemen everywhere and also (certainly when I was very young) bomb damage in some places. I think it is ok to show the films, but there does need to be proper discussion and teaching about it so that it doesn't traumatise youngsters. It is a fine line between upsetting children and giving them an education so that, hopefully, these kinds of things never happen again.

At my school they teach ww 2 in year 6, but it is done very much from a 'home front' point of view, looking at evacuees and getting children to think about that side of it, although they do cover the main points of the war.

Ww 2 is covered again in secondary with more emphasis on the events in Germany and Europe.

I really do think that 9 is too young to have those sorts of images and concepts foisted upon them. Most 9 year olds are just not emotionally mature enough to understand the issues surrounding the holocaust - it's not necessary for them to have to understand it all that young. Yes, there are children all around the world who are witnessing atrocities every day, but why does that mean that our children have to do the same? Surely we should be thankful that we can shelter them from the shitiness of the human condition while they are still young children? I'm not saying they should never learn, of course not, but 9 years old is just too young to be able to process those sorts of concepts.

I agree with others on this thread that allowing 9-year-olds to Google images of concentration camps without any supervision is wildly inappropriate. There are some images that young children should not see, IMO. Yes, we have the luxury to protect our children from disturbing images that they do not have the capacity to process. And that is a good thing. Exposing children to graphic images of violence at very young ages does not achieve anything constructive, IMO. In fact, I would say it achieves quite the opposite.

Should 9-year-olds learn about WWII? Absolutely. Should they learn about concentration camps? Unquestionably. But there are far better methods of educating children than random Google searches.

It seems to me that there is a fairly clear divide of opinion here: I haven't noticed a single poster with family connection to the Holocaust supporting the view that we should delay teaching children about it.

I was very cross with my dd's teacher in Y5, who completely changed a lesson plan because of dd's reaction. They were discussing the treatment of the Jews during WW2 and dd, knowing something of our family history and therefore what was coming next, became very distressed and wept. The teacher cancelled the lesson partly because dd was distressed, but mostly because she didn't want the other children to be upset by dd. Her words, not mine.

Sorry, but that is very wrong. Comfort the distressed child by all means, but don't compromise the other children's' education! Don't teach them that because it's an upsetting subject we don't need to bother studying it. It is so important.

(BTW I do agree, though, that the images should have been pre-selected. Unless it's a lesson in information-gathering, telling the children to google is lazy.)

'It seems to me that there is a fairly clear divide of opinion here: I haven't noticed a single poster with family connection to the Holocaust supporting the view that we should delay teaching children about it.'

Which divide is that?

I haven't noticed anyone saying that children shouldn't be taught about the Holocaust, the debate seems to be over which imagery is used in the teaching.

To my mind the problem is that these children don’t know about these things and are suddenly hit with them in a lesson as one big ‘shock,’ though I don’t agree with randomly googling images at that age.

I grew up with the direct effects of the atrocities and already knew the levels (including what happened to those survivors sold out at Yalta) and far too many details by the time I first saw pictures; consequently I accepted them as the pictorial evidence of what I’d already been told about.
I was given a great deal of very harrowing detail as a child and chose not to pass all of it on to my children unless and until it served an active purpose, but brought them up aware and age appropriately knowledgeable.

I’ve never read the when Hitler stole pink rabbit or boy in the striped pyjamas type stories, and neither have my children. I can’t find it an appropriate subject for fiction or sentimentalisation, though I can understand if you didn’t grow up with it as omnipresent fact it might feel different.

The knowledge of how things worked when you scratch the surface helped me survive sudden conflict as a child, and in ’92 when the first pictures from Omarska emerged, many lies where told and initially accepted in Britain.
It was those with a close understanding of how long emaciation takes, who instantly saw through it and clamoured loudly and raised attention to what was clearly really going on.
I can’t begin to explain what those first two days where like knowing what we were looking at and seeing articles accepting the official line and explaining those images away, it was absolutely terrifying, but my faith in this country to not have buried it and the older generation to not turn away wasn’t wrong.

Those who criticise parents taking younger children to the holocaust exhibition in the IWM are you aware that large numbers of Jewish and reasonable numbers of Romany families go to it with children of all ages, including babies, and their children aren’t massively traumatised?

IMO it is the failure of parents to adequately prepare children for what they will learn, and allow them instead to be suddenly exposed, that results in trauma, not the knowledge or even images themselves.

Porn happens in real life, I wouldn't want my 9yr old exposed to images of that either.

Context and the stage of development of your individual child is the critical guide here I think - neither of which is within parental control in the classroom - so much greater care needs to be taken by schools. I don't think such images have a place at primary level.

I was exposed to these images too as a young child several decades ago, it was extremely inappropriate and disturbing.

*Fraumoose - I guess that is why you have to help children to reach a opinion on what happened - you want them to think - that's was dreadful, I would not go along with that.

Obviously when you get into teenage years you can appreciate the wider social and political context of the holocaust and understand that genicide continues and that sometimes there is just no explanation sad*

What I think older children might need to consider is that the situation in a totalitarian regime is much more 'That was dreadful and I would go along with that.' I used to organise Holocaust Memorial Day Educational Events. At one of them the speaker was Bertha Leverton who came here on a Kindertransport. She showed a slide of a group of schoolchildren one of who was Jewish. And she explained that how after the Nazis came to power that one of the children - who was Jewish - gave a birthday for her classmates and none of the children came. I asked why nobody - nobody at all - came. Might not some children have wanted to go?' And she said it would have been dangerous. You would have been reported as unpatriotic. The authorities would take an interest in your family. Parents might be interviewed as possible subversives'

In an environment like that, what would we do?

I think that - in some way - considering such questions is more educational for children than being confronted of images involving starvation, incarceration, overt brutality.