In 1967, at the Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, World History teacher Ron Jones was asked about the Holocaust by a student.
"Could it happen here?". According to the press release accompanying the latest retelling of the events that followed,
"Jones came up with an unusual answer. He decided to have a two week experiment in dictatorship.
His idea was to explain fascism to his class through a game, nothing more.
He never intended what resulted, where his class would be turned into a Fascist environment.
Where students gave up their freedom for the prospect of being superior to their neighbors.
Monday morning he straightened the classroom, dimmed the lights and played Wagnerian music.
The word "discipline" was written on the blackboard.
He then had the students sit up straight in their chairs with hands placed flat across the small of their backs.
In this setting, he devoted the remainder of the class to the topic of discipline.
By the second day, Jones developed a special greeting, a wave.
It became known as the Third Wave, and if students saw each other outside class, they were to use it.
In his lectures, Jones went from "discipline," to "strength through community," and then to "strength through action."
By midweek, his "experiment" expanded to sixty students, and by the week's end, more than two hundred were participating.
Other teachers and the school's principal stood by and watched.
The first sign of concern came when some students had taken it uponthemselves to report others who did not conform.
After just four days, things got out of hand. Jones feared for the safety of a few students who refused to participate.
To his dismay and alarm, the experiment was so blindly embraced by the students, that he cut the project short.
"Initially I just wanted to show my students how powerful the pressure to belong can be, but the exercise got out of control.
A momentum began to build that I couldn't slow, or even deter.
I became frightened by the day-to-day happenings in class, and was forced to call it off," recalls Jones.
Overnight, Jones became the subject of national controversy, sparking discussion on the appropriateness of exposing young adults to life's realities.
To some, he was an innovative hero and teacher; to others he was a Communist.
Many people were shocked and embarrassed that the same mentality which led to the Holocaust could develop so quickly, in 1967, in a pristine all-American setting, and an academic town no less, home to the well-known Stanford University.
About this website.
This page is set up to document the many different appearances of 'The Wave'.
Another recommended internet source of information is the Wikipedia entry on The Third Wave.
Feel free to contact us with remarks or additions.
According to the original author of 'The Wave', Mr. Ron Jones, the story is no fiction.
He describes how the story took place in 1967 at the Cubberley High School. The school which closed in 1979 was located in Palo Alto, California. Apart from Jones' own recollections, not much documentation exists about the experiment. Brief mention of the events can be found in the "The Cubberley Catamount" which was the Cubberley High School student newspaper.
On his website, Mr. Jones responds as follows to the many questions surrounding his story:
"I'm not proud of The Wave but I can't escape it! It is like a calling that just gets louder! For me The Wave is a story of ghosts. What we can be. The allure of good and evil. Choices. I'm sorry, but in the end I can't answer your questions about The Wave."
One of the students who took part in the 1967 Third Wave movement was Philip Neel. Now a Los Angeles film editor, he recently decided to make a documentary about The Wave. Neel tracked down a dozen of his Third Wave classmates, plus their parents, the school principal and Ron Jones himself. Together, they reached out to the original Third Wave class, some of whom are still traumatized by it. The documentary, entitled "Lesson Plan" premiered in Fall 2010.
Years after it all happened, Ron Jones wrote of his experiment in a short story called The Third Wave, published nationally in 1976 as Take As Directed in an alternative publication called the Whole Earth Review. From there the story was embraced worldwide, reprinted in its original form and used as the basis for various dramatizations.
Mr. Jones has his own website. He works as storyteller, public speaker and workshop leader.
Norman Lear, an American film maker, made a television adaptation of
Jones' original story, simply called 'The Wave'. The movie is described by the publishers as follows:
"A
thought-provoking dramatization of an actual classroom experiment on
individualism vs. conformity in which a high school teacher formed his own
"Reich" (called "The Wave") to show why the German people could so
willingly embrace Nazism. This unflinching yet sensitive 1981 Emmy
Award-winner raises critical questions: When does dedication to a group
cross the line from loyalty to fanaticism? Does power corrupt? What is the
nature of propaganda and mass persuasion? Can something like the Nazi
Holocaust happen again? Grades 7-12. Color. 46 minutes."
The Wave wins the 1981 Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Program and the 1981 Peabody Award.
After the successful movie, a novel was published based on the
teleplay, becoming a best-seller in Europe. To date, over 1.5 million
copies have been sold, and the story is required reading in many German
schools. Todd Strasser, a writer of books for children and young adults,
adapted the teleplay into a novel under the psuedonym "Morton
Rhue".
About the novel: "The powerful forces of group pressure that
pervaded many historic movements such as Nazism are recreated in the
classroom when history teacher Burt Ross introduces a "new" system to his
students. And before long "The Wave" with its rules of "strength through
discipline, community, and action" sweeps from the classroom through the
entire school. And as most of the students join the movement, Laurie
Saunders and David Collins recognize the frightening momentum of "The
Wave" and realize they must stop it before it's too late..."
In 2007, a German graphic novel was published based on The Wave, with illustrations by Stefani Kampmann. Samples of the illustrations can be found on Ms. Kampmann's website (click "Graphic Novel").
A more recent movie adaptation of The Wave is 'Die Welle' (2008). Director Dennis Gansel relocated the story to present-day Germany. The movie was nominated for the 2008 Grand Jury Prize of the Sundance Film Festival. Watch the trailer below:
In 1993, Ron Jones was invited by the German government to address
anti-fascist gatherings at the spiritual nerve of
the Third Reich, the Nuremberg-site of the famous Nazi-rallies, and
Hitler's private chambers, the Gold Room. In this place full of
ghosts, Ron Jones told his story. Witnesses learned of the
experiment not from the various dramatizations, but for the first
time from the simple truth.
A video was made of the event, showing Jones recounting the events that
led to his experiment, and what happened to the class during and
after The Wave.
The video was released by Dirksen-Molloy Productions. On their homepage, some background info can be found on 'The Wave', as well as other videos featuring Ron Jones. Here's a trailer for the video:
Emmy-nominated Hollywood producer Philip Neel was one of the students taking part in 'The Wave'. In 2010 he produced Lesson Plan, a documentary film about The Third Wave classroom experiment, as told by the original students and teacher Ron Jones. They re-tell the story of "what really happened" in their own words. Guest commentary also includes Philip Zimbardo (creator of the Stanford Prison Experiment), the school principal, a parent, other students at school, and many others.
Since its first screening at the Mill Valley Film Festival (San Rafael, CA) in October 2010, the documentary has been included in the official selections of various film festivals.
Ron Jones' story has inspired stage adapations around the globe.
Musical adapation by Gerard Knap In 1993, a Dutch highschool mounted a musical theatre production of 'The Wave', after having succesfully proposed the idea to Mr. Jones.
Gerard Knap initiated and directed this musical version. The (Dutch
languaged) production is now being performed by other highschools in the
Netherlands. Licensing is through the Toneelcentrale (in Dutch)
In 2000, Olaf Pyttlik composed and recorded a rock musical based on "The Wave". After a workshop and premiere in Canada (2000), the musical has been performed in the USA, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.
Year
Location
Language
2000
Manitoba Theatre Centre Warehouse Theatre (Winnipeg Fringe Festival), Canada - world premiere
After screening the German movie adaption, Ron Jones wrote a musical stage adaption for the Marsh Youth Theatre teen troup at the Marsh, a theatre in the San Francisco area. It premiered in January 2010. Of the various theatrical adaptations, this is the only one written by Jones with input from the students who were part of original experiment at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto. The world premiere was directed by Cliff Mayotte and featured music by David Denny, Kathy Peck and Emily Klion.
Interview with Jones as it appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle (January 30th, 2010).
Milgram Experiment, 1961: the perils of obedience
Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram tried to test the willingness of people to disregard their personal conscience. He set up a simple experiment to see how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist, with results that were deemed shocking at the time, and which put the holocaust in an entirely different perspective.
Iowa, 1968: blue eyes versus brown eyes
Iowa schoolteacher Jane Elliott performed a similar experiment with a class of third-grade students, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered. Through her experiment she gave the students a first-hand experience in the meaning of discrimination. The story of what she taught the children, and the impact that lesson had on their lives, was documented in PBS Frontline presentation which can be accessed online through the PBS website.
Stanford Prison Experiment, 1971
This experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. A group of undergraduate students was randomly divided into "guards" and "prisoners" in a mock prison. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond what even Zimbardo himself expected, and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days. Interest in the experiment was renewed when the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse scandal occurred.
