When my daughter was 5 years old and in Year 1 at our local primary school, she started to have nightmares. That's not so strange but when I asked her if she could remember what they were about she told me this. That her class had been shown a video of Billy the soldier who'd been injured by canon fire on the battlefield and he was traveling from the battlefield to the hospital at Scutari where Florence Nightingale and Mary Secole looked after him!
I was enraged! How dare the teacher be showing my young child such a video? When I questioned the teacher about it, she spoke with passion about her personal interest and research into the life of Mary Secole. I did not go further with the discussion - assuming that the teacher had brought her passion (perhaps a little over-enthusiastically) into the classroom.
A year later and as part of a curriculum development project I was involved with, I came across the
Don’t you think that there is a time for the Crimean war and it's NOT WHEN YOU ARE FIVE. I'd love to know how these topics are chosen and what evidence there is that teaching 5/6 years olds this type of content is developmentally appropriate. It certainly wasn't the right thing for my daughter (and others in the class) and it contributed to our decision to extract her from the state system for two years and why I did not allow my son to join the state system until he was 6.
What do you think?
