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.

You’d better put a massive trigger warning on this - OP won’t sleep for a month!!

I said I spoke to someone higher up.

I didn't say the person higher up was at the school.

Hope that is clear now.

What you are saying is ridiculous. It would be very unprofessional to say "yes of course you are right" and not mean it when someone reports concerns.

Well that explains everything 😒

Higher up where? The "Mad Mom's Club?"

Probably, but all professionalism has its limits when the complaints are your level of ridiculous and unwarranted.

I recently went with a primary school class to Manchester Museum (Y4). The vast majority were absolutely fascinated to see the unwrapped mummified remains of Asru and it was very sensitively handled by the staff who talked to the kids about respect and how the museum would do things differently now. They also asked children to pick their favourite object and made it clear they couldn’t pick Asru as she was a person not an object. No parents had an issue about the children being taken to see this despite it being much more “real” than a photograph and the kids being a lot younger.

Out of interest, what would your view be on your children seeing this OP?

Not really?

You heavily implied it was someone higher up in school, and that the teacher you're 'shaking and can't sleep' over was going to be removed.

Who were you speaking to if not someone higher up in school?

Higher up where? Council? Government? God??

😆 It might be good to look and see that for the most part, they aren’t remotely gruesome or distressing!

OP actually wrote at the beginning of the thread about the poignancy of the depicted parents’ grief. But it might actually be quite good for Y9 kids to see that. One aspect of showing them some of these photographs might be the “ew how weird the Victorians were” factor. But another side of it might actually to see, via a window into the past, the real love and grief and mourning these real people had for their deceased children and loved ones.

This kind of private, intimate, domestic history of children and motherhood/parenthood and grief, as I said upthread, is often left out of the “great men and their machines”, Great Exhibition/“Jolly old British Empire” type of history that traditionally focused on Brunel and the railways and industrialisation. Being able to witness, even 160 years later, these private photographic moments of bereavement and introspection is a good and thoughtful correlative to that.

I did nearly suggest God 🤣

I'm sure he's only too interested to hear about it - he must hear all sorts with prayer!

People like OP make me imagine he's more likely to say "I should send another flood" than "yes your teacher is unreasonable and you know much more than they do"

which you know to be unwarranted because you are... all seeing?

I think it is honestaqua who is purporting to be allseeing and all knowing, not me purportedly talking to someone allseeing and all knowing! She has no idea what was reported, but KNOWS it was unwarranted!

I didn't say it was unwarranted (but it sounds unwarranted from your explanation).

I'm just interested to know who you reported this teacher to, since it wasn't anyone in school!

@Friendlynortherner I found and read your link - it was atlasobscura, is that right? It was quite difficult to read because the ads kept making it freeze but I read it in the end - I don't think that the author was a historian, and the person she quoted was a photographer/antique dealer - so I don't think it is an academic source, and I don't think it seeks to be either. I followed the links and references in the article and they didn't lead anywhere either. That is, the practice of photographing dead people as though they were still alive was not debunked, I don't think. I do think that the points made that some things from films end up being presented as real on social media however, and I agree with you that unless the photos came from a historical source, the teacher should have been wary of showing them as "history". If you see the post from @nyancatdays at 12:39 it contains some sources about the subject indicating that dead people posed with their still alive relatives. So in summary, it might be that the practice was real, but some of the photos on the net might be fake.

This was really interesting, thank you, and thanks for posting all the links.

Well she doesn't know because you are being weirdly evasive and you apparently spoke to someone who agreed with you but wasn't in the school but was high up

No, only you have the all seeing power to know all the children, control all the classes, understand the motivations of all the children and memorise the curriculum and how it should be delivered despite not working in that classroom. We just aren’t all as special as you are, don’t hold it against us.

I agree here. @RandomDepressedPun is incorrect. Victorians did pose dead children, sometimes with the living. Photography was expensive and it often happened that there was no living photo. I have a copy of the photo of my late MiL's brother, who died aged 4 c. 1928 (we buried the original in her coffin) - she confirmed it was taken after her brother Noel had died of pneumonia, aged 4. He appears to be wearing a knitted jumper, but this has been added (don't know how they did this in the 20s). Mortuary photos are not a hoax and continued into the early years of the twentieth century.

It wasn't relevant to the subject matter being taught, and wasn't appropriate in the context for a number of reasons. If you are an academic you are possibly out of touch with the needs of 13/14 year olds. But thanks for your other post, very interesting.

I would have thought the kids would have loved this. I remember being fascinated as a child by this type of thing and was taught about death photography when I was at school.

@Friendlynortherner, as someone with a PhD in the area and who is part of a major research institute on the subject, well, I am afraid you just aren't correct.
For reading, can I suggest you begin with John Troyer's Technologies of the Human Corpse which has a superb chapter on the connected history of death and photography? It's also discussed in Drew Faust's This Republic of Suffering. As the book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Faust was Harvard President, I hope that she is respected enough of a historian for you. Or, perhaps Thomas Laqueur's The Work of Dead? Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Without wishing to be a dreadful name dropper, Tom and I were discussing this topic just last week.
Or what about Jay Ruby's Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America? It's an older book now, but by an extremely esteemed scholar.
This doesn't mean that it hasn't become an internet trend and that many of those links that you see online are click-bait nonsense, but there is a large scholarly literature that does more than support its existence.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I haven't said or implied any of those things.

I said that I doubted these photos were on the curriculum and asked a couple of teachers to confirm.

I didn't give an explanation though, I didn't say anything about what was reported, nor to whom, so you would have no idea whether it was unwarranted or not.

Since you continue to be evasive, I'll be clear:

Who exactly did you report this teacher to? What organisation were they part of? What authority did they have to act on your concerns?