Over a career of more than 30 years, I have taught some literature that has confronted students from late elementary grades straight through high school with the reality that human beings can do brutal things to each other.  In works of literary nonfiction, as well as in fictionalized depictions of abuse and atrocities that we know to transpire in real life, students have critical opportunities to recognize, identify, investigate the insidious elements of the human psyche and their manifestations in actions toward others.

As my students have examined the concept of dehumanization in various forms and on a spectrum of scales–from domestic violence to genocide–the vast majority of them easily grasp the harm it does to victims.  They even express their belief that racism, sexism, homophobia, targeting of particular religions and speakers of particular languages, and even cliquism and political ostracism are phenomena that victimize individuals and groups by diminishing their humanity.  Ironically, this awareness does not entirely inoculate them from the shared human impulses that give rise to these phenomena.

Some of the same students who offer inspiring insights on these points in class discussions and in literary essays remain susceptible to a youth culture whose impulses are familiar to my generation but whose pressures and toxic manifestations exceed what we could ever have imagined a few decades ago.

Regrettably, a forty-five minute English class five days a week has a limited reach into the lives of students these days.  Instruction in social and emotional learning and reinforcement from history classes can extend that reach somewhat.  Even then, our reach exceeds our grasp in capturing our students’ attention and imaginations in a sustained and transformative manner.

A few sensitive and perceptive students have raised some provocative questions in my class.  Some have asked how civic and humanitarian ignorance has dehumanized our society, leaving us complicit to environmental devastation, social injustice, governmental misdirection, and various other ills that plague our world.

A tiny handful have even asked whether it is possible to find humanity in people who perpetrate atrocities: abusers, cartel leaders, war criminals, authoritarian dictators, and engineers of genocide.

Posing a such questions requires courage.  We could so easily be mistaken for trying to excuse people who commit such inhuman acts.  But at the same time, do we by labeling them monsters participate in another kind of dehumanization, justified though it may be?  Might we risk overlooking explanations that originate in dark elements and mechanisms that reside to some degree within all of us?  Could we in our understandable outrage unwittingly ignore human realities that would simply continue to harm susceptible people from within and transform them into continuous waves of agents to bring abuses and horrors into the world?

Without excusing or rationalizing evil in the world, can we meaningfully seek its explanations in the human realities affecting the individuals who carry it out?

Or should we even bother?

Photo credit: Walks Inside Rome

I am participating in the Two Writing Teachers March 2023 Slice of Life Challenge.