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 think 9 is too young. I remember learning about WW2 in primary school and it was more focused on evacuees and the blitz. I did read Anne Franks diary when I was 9 though. It was a birthday present from my grandparents. So I was aware of the holocaust even if the school weren't teaching it.

I studied the holocaust and Nazi Germany from 14-18.

It is not a luxury for children these days to be sensitive to images such as these. I find them upsetting. So does everyone else surely?

If op was saying she didn't think her year 9 child (13/14) shouldn't have been shown them I would say she was being unreasonable but she's not. Her daughter is 9.

I think leaving it for the teen years is too late tbh if you want to impart any real message about the holocaust. But there should be greater supervision of a nine year old looking at those images. Not just sent home to google. Is that setting homework? It seems a bit slack considering the nature of the subject.

There are at least 3 years of secondary school during which children can be taught about holocaust. Why the insistence that they must know about it in primary before many of them are emotionally equipped to deal with that sort of stuff? I dont remember learning anything about the holocaust in primary but in secondary learnt loads about it and went to a concentration camp outside Berlin. Even then, I don't think I was mature enough to recognise the full horror of what happened.

As an aside, I have only seen the film, but 'the boy in the striped pyjamas' is a bloody terrible representation of the holocaust.

I think leaving it for the teen years is too late tbh if you want to impart any real message about the holocaust

Why? I'm not being goady there, I'm just not sure why?

Sorry but YABU. Children are allowed to find some topics upsetting. The world they live in isn't always a green and pleasant land!

Shit happens in this world. Sometimes part of life is to realise how much better off we are then other people (in the past and present).

The teacher will be doing things in a sensitive way but it's not a topic that can be wrapped in cotton wool (and nor should it be IMO).

I don't get why learning about the holocaust as a teen is leaving it too late to impart a message either

Parents are free to tell their children about history as well as relying on teachers to do so.

I don't imagine any child gets to their teens without knowing something about the holocaust.

i'mofftolisdoonvarna
Because adolescence is a time of our lives when we are a bit rubbish at understanding emotions.(for want of a better less sleep- deprived explanation) Probably because there's too much else going on. Yr 5 is probably a reasonable time to start learning about WWII
But I think 9 is too young to be "let loose" on unsolicited Internet images of starvation, torture and genocide.

I think the age range is fine; random googling on such a topic absolutely not, whether primary or secondary.
There are lots of positive stories to come out of holocaust education too - the incredible bravery of those targeted and of those who tried to help them, for example.

The biggest issue here is the random googling rather than the subject itself.

What on earth was the teacher thinking of?!

I'd be furious too OP. I don't think there's anything wrong with teaching 9 yr olds about WW2 but graphic images are completely unnecessary and upsetting for children and adults alike.
I don't like seeing graphic images and for that reason avoid the news but I still know whats going on in the world because I read about it.
We can still be aware of others suffering without watching them suffer. I think showing primary aged children images of corpses is morbid. They are still very much children and have several more years in education to learn about the horrors of the world.

I've just googled it. It's hoffific. Lots of dead body's in mass graves. Genuinely horrifying for me, not appropriate for 9 year olds IMO.

There have been a few threads like this. There was a similar one recently where the OP's 11 year old had been told by the teacher to look up the author Ian McEwan. Although the book by him that the class were studying was suitable, by looking online her DD had found a lot of information about his early work, which had a lot of dark themes such as incest and paedophilia and her DD was disturbed and upset. She was wondering whether to complain.

And you always get several posters who tell the OP they are being ridiculous for trying to protect their DCs from disturbing thoughts and images at a young age. Usually some bright spark chimes in 'does your DC have special needs?' If the DCs in question were 15, say, they might have a point, but we are talking about primary school aged children. Is it really so wrong to want to shield them from some of the world's horrors until they are of a more suitable age to deal with it?

Otherwise, why do we have age restrictions on films, etc?

I can only think that these posters are childless, or their DCs are very young and somehow they lack the ability to imagine having a 9 year old, and how they would deal with it.

Yes I agree, you should never let a class of kids Google anything Willy nilly at school, let alone anything to do with concentration camps.

I have been caught out Google imaging something with the smartboard on - it was something completely innocent and in my mind I never thought it would bring up anything inappropriate. And yet there on the second row was a topless lady!

Otherwise, why do we have age restrictions on films, etc?

Yes, good point.

I have also googled it, just now and one of the images is particularly horrific.

I would be tempted to mention it to the teacher tbh. I do think it's an important subject but surely it's important for educational "material" to be age -appropriate and clearly googling this subject was going to elicit images inappropriate for tat age group.
I can imagine that if a teacher were to discover a child had been "allowed" to watch an age- inappropriate Film by her parents that had led to her being upset then they would be rightly concerned.
Do you think that the parents were expected to filter the images first?
(not got to the school stage of parenting yet)

Teaching the holocaust is very necessary but I too would be concerned at the teaching technique of 'google images' - it is impossible for a teacher to supervise that sufficiently and there is no control. If your going to see the head teacher can I recommend they look at resources from the 'Holocaust Educational Trust' - lots of fab resources and opportunities for students to meet holocaust survivors.

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.'

Yy Fraumoose, I hhink that is the key lesson, at 9 you know that what happened was wrong, you cannot conceive of adults behaving like this, you see it as good vs bad.

As you mature you then realise that it is incredibly complex to understand how these atrocities occur - and some of it cannot be accounted for.

I don't know how how googling graphic images of concentration camps adds to that debate.

Well said Ubik

The outreach programme from the Holocaust Educational Trust only starts from year 6 upwards. I really think this subject matter is just not appropriate for anyone younger. I'm sure their programme for year 6 looks very different to that of for older kids, and almost certainly will not involve googling concentration camps.

In my opinion, if you want to teach anyone about the second world war then you cannot go far wrong with getting them to sit down and watch Jeremy Isaacs' The World at War. First hand testimony from people who were there but with the perspective of time.

tbh she should be sad and upset it is ok for a 9 year old to fnd this upsetting my dd also cried when she did it in high school at 11, she isn't a tiny child she is 9 and I know you are angry about it I do think children can cope with learning this at this age

We live in Germany, My children are half German. My 8yo knows the non-detailed basics about the Nazis and the Holocaust, but I think he is definitely too young to see graphic images.

We lived in Berlin and he picked up things from being out and about there - monuments and memorials, a glass plate in the ground under which was an installation of empty bookshelves as a memorial to the book burnings (seeing that developed into our first ever conversation about what happened. He was 5 or 6). My children will be confronted with it again and again. The Holocaust and the war are studied very thoroughly in German schools, as one might expect. But no teacher here would show graphic images to classes of 8 or 9yos. I'm honestly surprised at the number of posters on this thread thinking this is OK.

I was taught "you would probably have gone along with it too" but not until university. In fact, I'd say the only useful information I learned about WW2 came at university. Children are allowed to ditch history at 13 nowadays, which is the only justification in my view for teaching the detail of past horrors to younger children.

I was dreadfully upset in my mid-teens when I came across the sorts of images (on an evening TV programme) that the OP's child might have seen. The Holocaust was not discussed and remembered publicly in the way it is today, although there were a lot of programmes about World War Two. It was particularly distressing for me because I realised that if my grandparents had not managed to emigrate, my grandmother and mother would have suffered the fate of the people's bodies who I had seen.

But what really upset me is that my mother had not had any kind of discussion with me about anti-Semitism and the the Third Reich, or about what had happened to the people who didn't get out. Even after I rushed out of the room while the programme was still on, she did not follow me out and talk to me. The shock of seeing those images is still with me. It remains one of the most traumatic experiences of my life.

(I am not some sort of wimp, I should emphasise. I've gone on to read a lot about my mother's forebears. I even scripted a radio programme about a particular aspect of the Holocaust. I have also worked with those who have suffered trauma.)

I just think it would have been really, really helpful if my mother - or for that matter teachers or people at school - had talked to me in a gradual way, from say the age of 10 onwards about these issues.

I don't particularly support unsupervised googling, but I have no problem with children learning about the holocaust in junior school with some images. The teacher should choose some that bring home the reality without being extremely gruesome and forcing discussions that maybe are better left until later. My uncle was one of the troops at the liberation of Belsen and he had PTSD until he died by suicide when I was small. He always said that the material made public was the tip of the iceberg, he had seen horrors beyond description. I have never not known about what happened, that I can remember anyway. To me it is very important that it is never forgotten and that people are not over protected from it, and I'm only related to a witness not a victim.