THE PERCEPTION OF DEATH AMONG PUPILS IN THE 6TH YEAR OF PRIMARY SCHOOL

Abstract

There is an important question whether to include the serious topics such as war, death, holocaust to the teaching at primary school, or not, and if so, how to do it. We use the expressions, but several teachers and parents avoid explaining what they mean. The reason might be their shyness or a fear of this topic and the related question – how to explain that to a child. The theme of war is very abstract for the children at primary school. Albeit the children play knights with wooden swords (or shooters at their mobile phones, however, everything is played at the level of a game. The situation of two people standing face to face with the intention to kill each other is unthinkable. The children ask themselves and also the adults why they do it and whether they really mean to kill each other. In the Czech curriculum there is a subject which contains basics of history, geography and politics. In this subject in the 4th year pupils are taught about the Czech history for the first time. Teaching about history naturally means speaking about wars, death, oppressions. In the 5th year, both World Wars are parts of the textbooks. In the textbooks, we find factual mediation of the subject matter while the horror of the stated period merges into dates and events only. To describe them, it is possible to use a literary text which facilitates to induce an idea of the life in the periods of history. As we know, children's learning is the best when they learn through experience. We lead them to think about the stated issue and to express their opinions. We encourage them to cognize themselves. The paper describes the issue of perception of the concepts of death and war by Czech children in the 6th grade of primary school. We present the results of the pre-research Research of Reception and Interpretation of Historical Texts. For pre-research, we used our own design questionnaire to specifically focus on associations which pupils recollect about the concept of war. In the questionnaire we focused the pupils’ associations and how they evaluate literature that describes the life at that time. The pupils evaluated the reception of the texts in terms of comprehensibility and impressiveness and the potential of the texts (personal benefit, connection with their previous experience, possible inclusion in literary lessons). The questionnaire survey was followed by an interview using the focus group method. We provided the pupils with the opportunity to explain more the associations they had written and to talk about the text they had read. We are interested in how open they are to the real existence of the war. Whether they can imagine living in the war. How would such a life look like? What would they be afraid of the most? What do they feel when we talk about the war? The results of the pre-research and the research can serve like an incentive for teachers at primary school to open discussions about this topic in the particular subject and also in literary lessons. We find intentional literature a great “bridge” that sensitively mediates past events and helps the children experience the life in difficult times. Speaking about this topic can positively affect the child’s moral development.