Youth Conceptualizations of Evil and Implications for Social Studies Education

Abstract

It is crucial that social studies research attempt to understand students’ conceptualizations of evil because a longstanding societal issue is politicians furthering their agenda through the exploitation of the semantic impact of “evil” (Dews, 2008). If social studies teachers are informed about youth conceptualizations of evil, they might approach curriculum in a more meaningful and critical way, particularly contemporary events. George W. Bush infamously used the phrase “axis of evil” as a rallying cry for the United States’ war in Iraq (Bush, 2002) and more recently Stephen Harper has dubbed Iran as evil and also linked Nazism, MarxistLeninism, and terrorism together as reinventions of a similar evil that seeks to destroy “human liberty” (Marsden, 2012; Perkel, 2014). Evil is a familiar social signifier in politics and popular culture, but it is rarely defined or discussed. Yet, students’ nascent understanding of evil informs how they interpret historical and current events and whether they see such events as inevitable, thus affecting their sense of future possibilities. Dissecting the word itself and the concept of evil can change how teachers approach historical atrocities (e.g., genocides like the Holocaust/Shoah) and current events (e.g., political posturing over Iran and Russia). A significant lack of scholarship exists regarding how youths conceptualize evil. To begin to address this gap, we are reporting preliminary research that has shown a complexity in youth understandings of evil, highlighting the need for more exploratory research.