The Third Wave Experiment

Ron Jones was a history teacher at Palo Alto high school in California. He wanted to teach his students about how the inhuman culture in Nazi Germany was created and then thrived. He switched his usual dictating teaching style to an experimental learning mode to drive home his point. He started by informing the class that they would be simulating some aspects of the German experience. Even though he issued this warning the results shocked students, teachers, and parents alike.

First Jones created certain classroom rules that were to be obeyed without question. The answers to questions were limited to three words and required that “Sir” be added to the end. He would make students stand erect besides their desks when answering questions. Soon no one challenged these arbitrary rules and just like in the mock prison and psychiatric ward the situation started to change. The more intelligent and verbal students would start to be replaced as dominant class leaders by the physically superior classmates. The class room movement was soon named “The Third Wave.” A distinct solute was started and slogans would be shouted in harmony upon command. These slogans included such phrases as “strength through community; strength through discipline; strength through pride; and strength through action.”

A secret handshake was introduced to distinguish members from non-members. Critics of The Third Wave would be reported and accused of treason. The group made banners and recruited new members and would teach them the mandatory slogans, hand shakes, responses, and sitting positions. The original 20 students soon ballooned to more than 100. The students soon took over the assignment themselves. They issued membership cards, ordered some of the smartest students out of their classes, and were delighted to abuse them as they left. 

Jones soon announced that there was a nation wide movement to find students who would fight for political change. A rally was scheduled for the next day where a presidential candidate would grace the television screens and announce the newly created Third Wave Youth program. Exhilarated members plastered posters around the school. The next day the auditorium was filled with more than 200 students. Jones’s friends acted as news reporters circulating photographs and fliers about “true believers.” Soon the television was on and everyone waited in unabashed attention and anticipation shouting their slogans. But no presidential candidate showed.

Instead a film of the Nuremberg rally played. (The Nuremberg Rally was an annual event (from 1923 to 1938) that the Nazi party sponsored to promote their propaganda campaigns, especially after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.) The Third Reich’s history was viewed and the students were left with their haunting images. “Everyone must accept the blame—no one can claim that they didn’t in some way take part,” was the closing frame of the film and the end of The Third Wave.

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