How do ordinary people commit extraordinary evil? Brian Didier, Chair of Proctor’s History Department, has been sitting with that question for decades. He first encountered it as a graduate student researching human conflict, and it has since become the anchor of a year-long College-Level History elective at Proctor, “Human Rights and Wrongs.”
The fall term opens with a paradox. Humans are capable of extraordinary compassion. For example, sharing resources, caring for strangers, and building communities around cooperation. They are also capable of wars that kill millions, genocides that exterminate entire populations, and societies that make hatred systemic. This course does not sidestep the contradiction; it begins there, with a question that lacks a clear answer. Are humans fundamentally good or essentially evil?
Students spend the fall examining the evolutionary, social, and psychological forces behind that question. The class moves through chimpanzee communities and group selection – the in-group and out-group wiring that preceded modern human cognition by millions of years. It moves through Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments and the social psychology of group behavior under ideological pressure. Every human community shares a single prohibition. "It's a human universal. In all human communities, there is the principle ‘thou shalt not kill.’ And yet," Brian notes, "humans are really good at doing it anyway.” Understanding how is what the fall term asks students to do.
The material is difficult, and Brian emphasizes this point at the start of every year. He has taught this course for nearly fifteen years, and the content still affects him. “We talk about the difference between being observers and voyeurs," Brian explains. "We're not looking at this material because it's violent. In order to prevent these kinds of things from happening, we have to steep ourselves in some of the details." At the end of class, particularly in the fall, Brian builds in periods of silence, just to sit with what has been read and discussed.
The winter term narrows the focus. Nazi Germany and the Holocaust become the primary case study – the most documented example of how ordinary people, under the right conditions, commit extraordinary evil. Students also choose their own episodes of collective violence or genocide from history and develop independent research projects (written paper and class presentation) organized around the concept of “social death,” the process by which victim populations come to be seen as different, then inferior, then expendable, across phases of discrimination that precede and enable the killing itself.
At the end of the winter term, Brian works with students one-on-one on their cases – some examples include the enslavement and systematic persecution of Black Americans, the Darfur genocide, and the displacement and mass killing of Native Americans across centuries of American history. These conversations are not lectures. He asks questions and pushes decisions back to the student. “Where does enslavement fit within the social death framework? Is this phase two, or something worse?” “Do you organize by phases or by chronology?” Brian provides historical scaffolding, but the shape of the argument – and the choice of how to make it – belongs to each student. The presentations carry significant weight in the course grade. The writing standard is high, and the expectations are explicit from the start.
In the spring, the course examines the post-World War II international order – the United Nations Charter, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Genocide Convention – which represent humanity's most sustained attempt to institutionalize the prevention of its own worst behavior. Students examine whether these mechanisms are having their intended effect, and whether that order is now shifting, and what that might mean.
College-Level courses at Proctor carry the same academic rigor as AP classes – in this case demanding writing, rigorous discussion, high presentation standards, and readings drawn from college-level material – but without the constraint of a prescribed curriculum or an external exam. "An AP curriculum is a kind of straitjacket," he says. The College Board's framework prescribes what is covered and how, often leaving little room for a teacher to follow where the material leads or to shape the course around the students in the room.
"These aren't lecture classes. These are typically small Proctor classes with high levels of support from your teacher, with high levels of expectation for student performance," Brian continues. The distinction between a rigorous course and a demanding one matters to Brian. "I'm not necessarily having them read more," he says. "The challenge should be at the intellectual level and at the academic level."
Human Rights and Wrongs has no grade or teacher recommendation requirements. Students sign a social contract at the start of the year – a document that names what is expected and invites them to decide whether they want to meet it. By Brian's estimate, more than half the students in the course are in Learning Skills in some form. That figure is not a footnote, but reflects Proctor’s educational philosophy. "Just because we learn differently," Brian says, "has nothing to do with our intelligence and has nothing to do with our academic ability."
At Proctor, college-level rigor and academic support are not in tension; they are designed to work together. The ability to sit with complexity, wrestle with difficult histories, and build an argument from primary sources is not a skill reserved for a particular kind of student – it is precisely what every student needs, and increasingly so.
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