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.

Get a grip. Your DC is a teenager and like many teenagers has seen much worse on YouTube or media messages.
My DD would love the lesson.

Our LA used to book a local cinema and it would be filled with seniors from several Scottish high schools. Not a great idea, to be honest.

Because there aren't any obviously

The fact that the teacher is still teaching, despite you saying SLT agreed with other 'issues' tells me that there aren't any issues. As a teacher, if there were any issues, that teacher would be removed!

The “higher up” people often agree with people like you in meetings etc because it makes you go away faster.

Im more disturbed by the back to front phrasing in your thread title OP.

But these photos are part of history, its part of our historic culture, its what was in fashion at the time. Like people will look back on road side shrines and shudder, we do the same about dead people propped up in a chair dressed in their Sunday best.

Really?! Oh yes! To make parents go away faster! What was I thinking?!

You guys are on form today too!

It wasn't the SLT I spoke to. It was not someone from the school.

But yes you are right, in one respect, as the decision was obviously taken that all should be left as it was.

Obviously!

Not the parents with legitimate and sensible concerns and complaints. Just the parents who think they know best even when their comments and concerns are a little on the unhinged side. Sometimes saying “yes, of course, you’re right,” with a nod and a smile does the job quicker than arguing with someone who can’t be reasoned with.

Your chief complaint here is that a history teacher showed a class pictures of something historic, which lots of people on this thread have told you is unreasonable. You have asked for advice and refused to engage with any viewpoint different from your own. You also believe yourself to know the children, the curriculum and how to engage the children better than their teacher does. I honestly can’t decide if you are bored and goady or just have a massively over inflated ego.

I'm sure they eye rolled and sighed as you left. 🙄
You don't have to agree with everything that the teacher decides to use in lessons. You certainly don't try to destroy their career unless it is gross misconduct.
How will your teenage DC cope in life without your barricades shielding them.

Then who on earth did you speak to?

There is no way the entire lesson was on the photos.

They are called memento mori. It's history, get over it. This is why she showed them to the kids. To stop ignorance and teach.

So who did you speak to?? You said you spoke to someone at the school who was equally as concerned as you - but it wasn't SLT????

This is inappropriate. Complain to the Head Teacher.

Why?
They're 13 and 14 year olds, not primary school aged

Oh, give over

Wait until they start learning about the Holocaust! Come on OP, these kids are teens. Death is on the news ALOT right now!

@Friendlynortherner I’m a nineteenth century historian. There are plenty of contemporary sources of these, especially from France and America - including adverts by commercial photographers who offered postmortem photography services, plus contemporary comment, often by the photographers themselves, on their methods of posing subjects, etc.

Discounting the Internet ones that are actually photographs of living people, there are plenty of examples where the subjects are posed explicitly as dead; and in America, it was especially common to depict the subject in a coffin or casket. There are probably more surviving examples of postmortem photography in American collections because the practice continued in frontier America for some time after it had passed its popularity in Europe (as documented by the folk historian Michael Lesy in the 1970s).

A lot of the actual early photographs themselves are difficult to obtain since they were types of physical (ie. non-negatives/not easily copy able) photography, such as cased daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes, commissioned for private mourning and often now held in private collections (however, I’ve copied an example below held in the Met, by Alphonse Le Blondel, a well known French studio photographer of the mid-1800s).

There is also a lot of academic work on this topic going back decades now. Obviously, much of it (and the links to sources) are in academic monographs and libraries difficult to access for non-scholars, but, just for a start, take a look at these open-access resources. The Patrizia Munforte article, the next to last link below, also discusses in depth the ambivalence of not knowing whether an image is a “true” postmortem photograph or not.

https://clements.umich.edu/exhibit/death-in-early-america/ - this resource from U of Michigan is especially good, with visual examples

https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/6241/1/6241.pdf - this article includes quotations from contemporary photographers on the practice

The Yale Review | Lili Hamlyn: "Camera Mortis"

Alphonse Le Blondel | [Postmortem] | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/114469/1/The%20Body%20of%20Ambivalence.%20The%20'Alive,%20Yet%20Dead'%20Portrait%20in%20the%20Nineteenth%20Century.pdf

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odbetd/ws/sendfile/send?accession=osu1144936478&disposition=inline

It's very telling that multiple people have asked who this 'higher up' was at the school that she spoke to, and she hasn't returned...

OP has come back to be extra unreasonable today it seems

I find it pretty egregious to be complaining about a teacher who is just teaching some quite well known bits of cultural history, in order to interest kids in the broader period they’re studying.

Why? I find it actually very interesting. Would I be happy to have it shown to a 5 year old, no but 14? Really? And they wonder why the children today can’t handle modern life. My children studied the holocaust younger than 13 and honestly not a lot gets worse than that.

But OP knows more than this teacher, and all teachers, and historians...