I understand the horrors of the Congo are not suitable for 8-year olds, but still I was surprised to read such an unambiguously positive take on our greatest mass murderer. Would you contact the teacher about this? What would be a better phrasing for a young audience?

40 comments

  2. > Would you contact the teacher about this?

    No. The teacher has (almost) no bearing on the actual material used.

    > What would be a better phrasing for a young audience?

    IMO 8 year old kids should not be taught all the shit that happened in the Congo. In highschool this was part of the curriculum for my school, and we did see the full picture.

  3. hmm, I get where you are coming from, but how do you word it without young kids asking: “But why?” and ending up with murder, enslavement, and disfigurement? I can accept it if, at a later stage, they revisit certain parts of history and they go deeper into the dark past of Leopold II.

  4. Also not true; Congo Free State was taken away from Leopold II before his death by international pressure because he made it too ‘gortig’. Coming from the British and French, that’s quite a statement in its own right.

  6. I tead this text before. I think they might have taken this from the old book ´s Lands Glorie, which is from the 1950s or so.

  7. Hmmm, this is a difficult one. Trying to think back when I was 8 years old, at that age you have at least a notion of death and murder (especially as I grew up in the aftermath of Dutroux as a toddler), so completely hushing things out seems definitely too overbearing for that age.

    I’d think of something like this might be suitable.
    “Hij gebruikte de rubberplantages in de Belgische kolonie Congo om van België een rijk land te maken. Hiermee werden onder andere het Justitiepaleis in Brussel en de triomfboog van het Jubelpark gebouwd. In Congo werden de mensen echter uitgebuit om rubber te oogsten voor België, en heel veel Congolezen stierven door hongersnood en mishandeling.”

  9. You could contact the teacher. Perhaps they’re willing to change the text in the future or provide some additional explanation in the classroom. Though, personally, I would have hated it if parents tried to micromanage my job. All takes seem overly positive. I wonder what it says about Leopold III…

  10. That’s sad.

    I thought there would be some improvement 25 years after I was in that stage but alas 🙁

  11. The use of the highlighter is so depressing. That’s poor learning practices being instilled in 8-9 year olds right then and there. History is not about memorizing timelines and specific details like whether or not Albert I enjoyed rock climbing or fell off a cliff. It’s about seeing the bigger picture, about the history of ideologies, and the evolution of society and which kinds of factors drove said evolution.

    I understand very well that you can’t teach that level of detail to 8-9 year olds. But when you teach poor learning practices at an early age – and I can confirm that the encouragement of those learning practices endures all the way through high school – then what happens is that by the time they enter college they’re not only unprepared, but woefully misprepared.

    They’re taught that superficial memorization trumps insight. In college they will discover that it does not, but of course then it will be too late.

  12. I would argue that this is a bit too positive. I can understand that you don’t want to teach young children about genocides and slavery, but if I read this as a young child I would think that Leopold II was the best king of Belgium.
    If I were this teacher I would state that while Belgium prospered during this time, it came at a cost for the Congolese people who were used by the king. This way you don’t make it too dark, yet you make it so when they do learn about the atrocities in Congo they already have some previous knowledge. I would say yes, do start a conversation with the teacher, maybe even with other parents who may feel the same way.

  13. Ik zou het zo laten in het middelbaar hebben mijn geschiedenis leerkracht de echte geschiedenis vertelt over Congo en andere dingen.
    Als ze er daar nog steeds doekjes om wikkelen dan zou ik wel naar de leerkracht gaan

  14. Well they aren’t wrong, he was pretty good for our country, no one gave a shit about people in Congo back than

  15. Two pages on: “Hitler, Adolf: German Reichskanzler from 1933 until 1945; He built highways all over Germany.”

  16. From an actual modern method, not something a teacher slapped together (translated to English) : ‘Leopold II had a lot of dreams. He wanted to build spectacular buildings in Belgium, which he did. But to do so, he needed money. Congo had been just discovered and it was decided Leopold could be king there too. He noticed quickly that he could earn a lot of money by making the people of Congo work in rubberplantations. Sadly he did not take good care of these people. People who didn’t produce enough rubber were horribly (GRUWELIJK, it says in Dutch) punished. Leopold was not a nice king. He had 3 daughters and a son, but the son died when he was 10. Because of this Leopold 2 had no direct heir. ‘

    It can and should be different from what your son learns from this teacher. As a someone studying to be one, I’ m ashamed in their place.

  17. Ok sure, an 8 yo is a bit too young to learn about the horrors that took place in Congo. However, this text is like “adolf hitler was a passionate leader. He liked to paint, created volkswagen and his party’s actions led to great progress in aviation.”

    The text should at least mention that Leopold was a bad person.

  19. I am 20 years old and learned very recently (two years ago?) about the atrocities in Congo, and not in secondary school but in a german high school. I can say that I learned much more things about Belgium in Germany than I did when I was in school here. Even if you don’t tell the teacher (which might still be a good discussion) at least explain it to your child, because I was shocked that nobody in Belgium taught me about this before.

  21. As a child I was never thaught of the horrors we comitted in congo, I only learned that in my mid teens I think

  22. Leopold II did do great things for Belgium and he did build a colony, it’s all just dry facts. An 8 year old kid isn’t going to look for any horrible details, don’t go looking for trouble where there aren’t any.

  23. My kid just learned about this as well.

    She is 8, in the class the teacher said that during Leopold’s reign in Congo “a lot of bad things happened” and “a lot of people got hurt” and that to them he was a “very bad man”.

    Further details are not needed at that age but something has to be mentioned of the atrocities

  24. I’m in my forties and I never learned about this in school. I learned it in my twenties through a documentary on TV and I was shocked. I’m sure many Belgian people have no idea about this topic.

  26. Can we stop with the hate boner towards Leopold II, like how he’s somehow comparable to Hitler?

    Most of the horrors done in Congo were due more to his disinterest toward how people in charges handled things than his express orders. You can say he was *responsible* for it, but it’s not like he decided to do things that way himself.

  27. I only found out about Leopold 2 and what happened in the Congo when I was in 6th grade (6de leerjaar). Even the teacher then said that he wasn’t even allowed to tell us but thought it was important for us to know. This was back in 2008

  28. There is nothing wrong with neither the content nor the tone of that phrase. He did leave a huge colony to Belgium, that’s a fact. And the statement is neither positive nor negative. It is very neutral.

    Don’t start brainwashing our 8 year olds putting Leopold II in a bad light. The situation in Congo was very bad, but not as horrible as some wokies will try to make you believe. The main culprits were the magnates controlling the land and industry, not Leopold as a person. Leopold fought his whole life against slavery and the situation in Congo, but he was also aware that he couldn’t go too strongly against the industrials as they could depose him quite easily. He was one of the world leaders abolishing slavery and setting the base for what would become the Declaration of Human Rights, and the archives are packed with memos to his governors in Congo to put things to order.

    Also the stories you hear today are somewhat exaggerated. I’ve read woke articles talking about 20 million dead Congolese, while the total estimated population of the country was only about 8 million at the time. That’s mathematically just impossible. An eye witness of the time (an English journalist) speaks about 1 million, and even that is most probably an exaggeration. England, France and Germany laughingly left central Africa to Belgium, thinking it was worthless. When they saw the richness (rubber, diamonds, wood,…) it provided, they did everything trying to get Belgium/Leopold out of Africa and claim the land themselves. Hence the slandering.

    They also seem to ignore the many epidemics (during the Belgian rule one of the biggest malaria epidemics ever broke out in the East of the country, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths) and also the fact that most of the Force Publique were native Congolese (!) abusing their position to fight out tribal wars.

    So yes, things weren’t very nice in Congo at the time. But to shove it all into Leopold’s shoes, is not ok.

  31. 8 years is old enough to learn what actually happened in Congo. Every 8 year old has already seen squid game

  34. is it really that surprising when there is still a massive statute of Leopold II near Porte de Namur in Brussels ?

  36. It just says he created the colony, which is factually correct. A lot of things you read and hear about Congo are correct, a lot of it is also exaggerated British propaganda. Seems logical that this is dissected when the students are older, not when they are just 8 and still believe Sinterklaas is real. Which is exactly what we did when we were 17, by the way.

  37. We have a Belgian parliamentary commission that is looking into political responsibility and policy recommendations concerning our colonial history. They see an important role for our educational system. And so do I. 8 year olds are old enough to learn some not so super sugarcoated lessons. This is just crazy… What school is this?

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