To think this is wrong for an 8yr old to be asked to say in assembly?

[gingerbiscuitandacuppatea]

DD (age 8 in yr 3) is doing a UNICEF assembly soon about child labour. They are reading out some examples of children's experiences, like carrying rocks up a hill, looking after cows etc.

my DD's lines include

"She used to slap me and shout at me. One day she poured petrol over me and set it alight. I rushed to the sink and splashed water over myself so luckily I wasn't too badly burned. They gave me cream for my burns and locked me in my room."

Would you be happy about your 8 year old being given those lines? I'm not happy that she now knows about people doing something so horrible, surely children this age do not need exposing to this at school?

Agreed, mimi and cakecrumbs. I monitor very closely what my DD watches or hears, and I talk to her about things when they come up, in ways she can understand. I haven't the least bit of concern about her 'general knowledge' now or in the future. She knows about things like child labour and slavery, on a level that I (as her parent and knowing her personality and her level of understanding) feel age appropriate. She knows more about Putin than many kids twice or three times her age, because she likes Pussy Riot and was interested in their story. She knows on a very, very childish level about the Holocaust, because it is part of our family story - but she doesn't need to know gruesome details now, she needs to have the seeds sown for understanding later. We live in a place with a long history of violence, and shielding her from aspects of that is one of my jobs as her mum.

But honestly, the idea of "General Knowledge" with Capital Letters (!) makes me feel a bit sick. I'm not educating my child so that she will 'compete academically'; I'm making determinations about what educated citizens of the world ought to know, what values I wish her to develop, and I'm a lot more interested in teaching her critical thinking skills than current affairs at this stage of her life. She's happy, resilient, and empathetic. Good.

I'm tempted to bastardize Einstein: General Knowledge is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

However, maybe "Imagination is more important than knowledge." is more appropriate in this context. A child with imagination will get more from 'some people are bad to others' than a child without imagination will get from the graphic and violent description the OP's daughter is being asked to read.