How (and why!) we talk about Difficult History
We believe that children are capable of understanding anything, provided that it’s talked about in age-appropriate language. Kids are deeply intelligent, mostly resilient creatures, who have an innate capacity to take a new piece of information and transform it into something they understand. Often our avoidance of talking about complicated historical events, like war or slavery, is about our discomfort as adults, not an inability of children to understand.
We commit, in our workbooks, to ensuring that we cover aspects of Difficult History, using age-appropriate language. We can’t write about Jamaica without talking about slavery. We can’t write about Morocco without mentioning the sidelining of the Amazigh people. We can’t write about India without discussing British colonialism. If we want kids to dig deeper into understanding different countries and cultures, to go beyond the stereotype of France as the Eiffel Tower and a man in a stripey shirt with a baguette under his arm, then we can’t avoid some tricky subjects.
Our workbooks aren’t history books (although keep your eyes out for a new project from us…) so not every historical injustice discovered in our workbooks, nor do we think it's appropriate to discuss everything. While making our Mexico workbook we had a long discussion about human sacrifice in Aztec civilisations and eventually decided to mention it in passing, but not dig deep into it. That’s partly because I’m a vegetarian and the idea of human sacrifice (and occasionally cannibalism) makes me queasy, but also because many of the sacrificees were children or virgins. While some kids may revel in the gore of human sacrifice, we decided many more would be disturbed. So it’s out.
If you’re interested here’s an article about exactly how much the Aztecs LOVED human sacrifice.
We had another discussion over whether to include Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book in our India workbook. On the one hand, it’s a wonderful book that shows the beauty of Indian jungles and the range of animals, plus it’s a touchstone for many adults. On the other hand, Kipling was a raging racist and some of the underlying narratives of the Jungle Book are about white racial superiority (let’s not even get started on the 1967 Disney film).
For us, teaching kids about the world can’t be done without teaching them some Difficult History. Sometimes we’ll get it wrong, hopefully most of the time we’ll get it right.
We’ve also written another blog post about Tips for helping your kids understand Difficult History. We try to explain issues as clearly and calmly as possible, but can’t answer questions from kids. This resource is designed to help parents with this.