Villainification and Evil in Social Studies Education

Abstract

Villainification is the process of creating single actors as the faces of systemic harm, with those hyperindividualized villains losing their ordinary characteristics. Like heroification, there is a simplified portrayal of historical actors, but villainification has particularly harmful consequences. We suggest that villainification obscures the way in which evil operates through everyday actions and unquestioned structures because of the focus on the whim of one person. Although it is unfortunate that we do not often see how we can inadvertently help others and make systemic change, it is very disturbing when we fail to see our own part in the suffering of others. This article critiques one-dimensional portrayals of evildoers in K–12 social studies and popular sentiment and offers a framework via the political theory of Hannah Arendt to educate for a sensibility of interconnected responsibility among members of a society instead of blaming one person for systemic harm or diffusing blame into an amorphous entity (e.g., “society”).

Keywords:

• Arendt
• banality of evil
• heroification
• villainification

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors would like to thank Anthony Brown for his helpful comments about the article as well as Kent den Heyer, Greg Thomas, and Jason Wallin for their feedback regarding the idea of villainification and its expression in Cathryn’s doctoral dissertation.

FUNDING

This research was supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta (752-2015-1882).

Notes

¹ Scholars, such as Christopher R. Browning and Bettina Stangneth, attested that Arendt chose a poor example for an otherwise important concept. Stangneth (2015) gathered transcripts from interviews as well as Eichmann’s own writing, all of which clearly show that Eichmann was a convinced Nazi, including a hatred of the Jewish people. Browning (1993) has provided a better example of the banality of evil through an examination of the transformation of the regular men of the Order Police into brutal killers in the 1930s.

² In the former Yugoslavia, war ensued between the breakaway republics in the early 1990s—most notably Serbia, Slovenia, and Croatia. When people in Bosnia attempted to secede from Serbia, the Serbian military (under the leadership of Slobodan Milosevic) invaded and then began genocide, euphemistically called “ethnic cleansing,” against Bosnian Muslims (“Bosniaks”). Individuals from Serbia, as well as ethnic Serbian Bosnians, drove Bosniaks into concentration camps where they tortured, starved, and murdered civilians as well as gang-raped women and girls.

³ Beginning in the late 1800s, the U.S. and Canadian governments both operated schools, primarily located on Indian reservations/reserves. Government officials removed Indigenous children from their homes and families to sever connections to their culture and assimilate them into U.S./Canadian White cultural norms. The curriculum varied, but generally included basic academic skills, industrial training, and Christian doctrine. Some of the individuals operating and teaching at the schools emotionally, physically, and sexually abused the students. In Canada, compulsory attendance ended in 1948. In the United States, Indigenous people gained the legal right to refuse that their children be placed in off-reservation schools in 1978. Some of the individuals associated with these schools are discussed in more detail later in this article.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) doctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta (752-2015-1882).