Teacher showing photos to kids of victorian dead children - slightly disturbing

[whyiwonderwhy]

I am finding this so disturbing I can't sleep! However I might be being oversensitive, who knows. It is the "but - WHY?" bit which is bothering me most.

The lesson was about the industrial revolution, and the subject of photography came up, 2 of the earliest photos were shown to the class (13-14yo) and then....I wish I could say the teacher showed photos of some of the extraordinary engineering inventions of the day, or of busy streets, or China, or something wonderful and extraordinary...but no, the teacher showed 10 photos of dead children and talked about how the Victorians would photograph dead children as though they were still alive, with the rest of the family, in a commemorative way. I have seen some in the past (I didn't learn about it at school however) and they are moving and tragic and disturbing. Nothing else, just these photos.

Just wondering...why? why would the teacher do this? Any ideas?

This teacher has form by the way. A lot of it. But this has for some reason blindsided me.

Oof the arrogance here
Telling a teacher they don't know what they're on about because you'd merely studied the subject

It’s fine. It’s also not up to you to tell the teacher how to teach.

Nothing else?? Of course they are learning about other things too. Child mortality was a huge part of the industrial revolution. Kids worked and died

The photos were completely out of context

You don't know the context, because you weren't in the lesson!

I know this Teacher and I know the kids

You just happen to know all the kids in your Year 9 child's History class do you? Catch yourself on, OP.

This thread is embarrassing to be honest. You're telling actual qualified Teachers on this thread that you know better than them but unless the Mother of all dripfeeds is coming and you are actually a secondary school History Teacher I'm afraid your confidence is misplaced.

You clearly just don't like your DC's History Teacher and are looking to find fault with her.

Imagine being upset about this. 13-14 years are watching violent porn and all manner of violent stuff on the internet and you are concerned about dead Victorian children.

You’re bizarre.

Totally agree with everything in this post.

When I was the same age, one of the teachers at our school had visited the Ganges, and took lots of photos. We were shown them in a school assembly on a big screen. People dump their dead in the Ganges river. We saw photos of bloated bodies, next to kids washing their faces and their parents washing clothing.

Yes, i am aware of all this and one of my previous posts mentions images in coffins, ondeath-beds and biers - I haven't disputed this, and agree they exist and were a thing. I'd be a crap historian if I didn't know this. But that's different to most of the discourse around so-called 'death photography ' online, and up-thread, where people are claiming children and adults were posed as though alive and you can't tell in the pictures that they're dead. There's no contemporary evidence indicating this practice ever existed. And I stand by the fact that posture stands are too flimsy to take the weight of a dead body, and that such skilled photagraphers would have been advertising their skills.

Which begs the question, if you can't tell they're dead, what's the evidence that they're dead? Apart from some unknown saying so online?
There are groups for this on Facebook, claiming every sleeping baby is dead, and seeing signs of grief in the normal sombre expressions of most Victorian photography subjects.

Apart from online, the only places I've read about this practice are in modern novels. You don't find it mentioned in contemporary novels, with all their frequent depictions of death.
You also don't tend to find reputable historians lending credence to this theory....

Photography was one of the Victorian inventions, and death photography was very popular. But the photos are not scary, a bit spooky when you know it are dead people, but not scary.

Love how you say because you have a degree you can teach day in day out. Good news is there are plenty of vacancies so you can go and plan your own lessons.

yet the one thing you won’t do is politely ask the teacher who would explain their reasoning and why they showed it.

there aren’t many photos of engines etc as photos were such a new technology. And also the photos haven’t survived.

the children see much more disturbing content on social media like the chub filter and Downs Syndrome filter on one of the social media channels.

If you are a child that is very interesting though no?

I am sure they also learn about great inventions, although probably not about the slavery that underpinned it though. If you want to get excited about something, I’d pick that.

14 year old me would have loved learning about that so much it might have tipped me into doing a history degree! The kids will love it.

My family bible has a couple of photos of deceased children, that was probably the only photo my ancestors had of their child.

It’s a part of history. They’re not gory and it shows Victorian attitudes to death and modernity.

History tends to involve a lot of dead people OP.

I’m surprised at people saying they were only taught the holocaust from age 14. In the 00s and 10s I was taught it pretty much every year from age 8 - disturbing photos of corpses in piles included in that teaching.

It was done because photography was so expensive people would often never have had the chance to get a photo of their loved ones and so it was a bit of a desperate last attempt at having a photo to remember them by.
Part of the history curriculum is understanding the experience of people in the past.
This is entirely appropriate, it is exploring the experience of those who lost someone in a context of financial hardship and they lengths the would go to to have a photo to remember what they looked like.
There are a lot of uncomfortable subjects taught in history and your children are not little.
I think you are being ridiculous. They are a few years away from being adults and need to be developing adult levels of critical thinking, empathy etc.

Personally I think it’s really weird to have an open casket with 1000’s of people trooping past!

This. Can’t learn about this period in history fully without the cultural context of death being part of life more than it is now

I think it's weirder to be uptight and ignorant, especially thinking you're superior when you're in the minority. I wasn't talking about the pope, I was talking about the many cultures around the world who have open caskets. Weirder to shove your loved one in a box never to see them again, but each to their own aye.

I thought you were going to say year 6! Year 9 is absolutely fine. It’s interesting.

Was the lesson literally “The camera was invented. Victorians took pictures of dead people. Look at some . The end.”?

That what you seem to imply, and if that was indeed the case, it would’ve been a pretty crappy lesson, pictures or no pictures.

If it was however a lesson about invention (the camera) , social inequalities and changes to now (how expensive having your picture taken was, that most people wouldn’t have had one in their lifetime, the memento mori mentality etc) , low life expectancies and spread of diseases due to slums, unsanitary conditions, overcrowding etc. and setting/adding context and the fact that it wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows and fantastic and marvellous (like you expected) for the vast majority of people , then that would’ve been a great lesson.

DD’s teacher (y8) did 3 lessons on the slavery side of things when they did the industrial revolution, alongside many other positives and negatives.

I worked in the death industry when I was younger and was always shocked by how modern people are so distanced from the realities of death. Its going to happen to you, me and your children. It's far more healthy to accept the reality of the situation the put your head in the sand than pretend that it's not inevitable.

I thought OP was annoyed because her kid was in year 4 or something. Kid is actually in year 9 and in a history lesson being shown historical photographs…..

don’t email the school op. It’ll be embarrassing for you. It’s a history lesson. The photos are a part of history and definitely not as horrible as some photos they might see of (eg) the Second World War.

if your kid found them very difficult to cope with, perhaps recommend they don’t choose history as a GcSE option in case they have to look at more photos of things they don’t like

No it really isn't.

I think it's fine to tell the children that the Victorians did this, but not to show them the photographs.