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For the book by Alvin Toffler, see The Third Wave (book). For the Swedish action film "The Third Wave" (Den tredje vågen), see The Third Wave (film). For other meanings, see Third Wave (disambiguation page).
The Third Wave was the name given by history teacher Ron Jones to an experimental recreation of Nazi Germany which he claims to have conducted with high school students.
The experiment took place at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California during one week in 1967. Jones, unable to explain to his students why the German youth allowed the Nazi Party to exterminate millions of Jews and other so-called 'undesirables', decided to show them instead. Jones writes that he started with simple things like classroom discipline, and managed to meld his history class into a group with a supreme sense of purpose and no small amount of cliquishness. Jones named the movement "The Third Wave," after the common wisdom that the third in a series of ocean waves is always the strongest, and claimed its members would revolutionize the world. The experiment allegedly took on a life of its own, with students from all over the school joining in; Jones wrote that he agonized over the outcome of the exercise before bringing it to a halt by claiming that the movement had a world-wide leader, and then displaying a film clip of him: Adolf Hitler.
Despite the clear implications of this study on the malleability of young minds (of particular interest to both psychologists seeking to understand and prevent it, and would-be world dictators attempting to recreate it), little has surfaced on the subject; Todd Strasser, under the pen name Morton Rhue, wrote a young-adult novel on the subject (entitled The Wave), which was later made into a movie and a play; later, Jones himself came forward with his own material. Researchers of the experiment have had some trouble in eliciting reports from any of the students involved.
THE THIRD WAVE was a classroom experiment on the workings and consequences of Fascism. It took place in 1967 in my World History Class at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California. The experiment that was initiated as a one-day exercise in the "power of discipline" became a five-day nightmare. Over 300 students eventually took part in The Wave. The desire to be "a part of the group," to be "successful" and "actively involved" in the experiment, replaced student curiosity and expression. Uniform behavior, salutes, tattling, their freedom for the promise of being superior to their classmates.

Bill says there was an anti-Wave group known as the Breakers. They got a custodian to let them into Mr. Jones's room, and they put up anti-Wave posters. Then Bill and Hal got a custodian to let them in, and they took pictures of the posters.

There were (at least) three World History teachers at Cubberley, so 1/3 or less of the class of 1970 would have been in the Third Wave experiment. Very few students outside his classes knew anything about the Third Wave in the year it happened, except perhaps from reading school newspaper coverage. It wasn't a big deal that year, except among some parents who objected to Jones' teaching style...

The 1960's were a rebellious time. "Individualism"There were civil rights marches and anti-war rallies. Some students talked openly of revolution. In the midst of all this, Ron Jones decided to introduce the idea of Nazism to his sophomores.
He asked them to sit up, erect, instead of slouching in their seats. Put your feet flat on the floor, straight ahead of you, he said, and keep your back straight
Looking at the story as a whole, it's very implausible that so much could happen in five days. We are dealing with a story here - five days of dramatic time, not actual time. As Ron Jones himself said,

At the rally on Friday, Mr Jones said
The group seemed to be composed of students from many persuasions. There were the athletes, the social prominents, the student leaders, the loners, the group of kids that always left school early, the bikers, the pseudo hip, a few representatives of the school's dadaist click (sic), and some of the students that hung out at the laundromat.
No, I don't think that's possible. He's making this up. I could believe that something like The Wave could spread to all members of one segment of the school (it might spread to all the jocks, for example), but not to all the different cliques. Not in a few days. That's not how high school sociology works.

He says he didn't plan the rally until Thursday, didn't even conceive it, but he managed to produce the event by 11:30 Friday morning. He arranged to have the use of the auditorium, he had several friends posing as reporters and photographers, he had Third Wave banners hanging like clouds over the assembly, he had a film of a Nuremburg rally ready to roll, and so forth, all in less than 24 hours, and it all went off without a hitch. No, I don't think so. An event like that has to be planned a long time in advance. It would take a week just to make the banners.

At the rally, Mr Jones spends the first few minutes getting them worked into a frenzy with chants of "Strength through discipline." He turns the TV on at 12:05. Nothing happens. At 12:07, somebody stands up and says "There isn't any leader is there?"
This is absolutely unrealistic. A student in that situation would not jump to that conclusion after two minutes. When no picture appeared on the TV, everybody would assume that there must be a technical glitch. The program has been delayed for some reason. Well, delays happen. After the buildup they have been given, it would never cross their minds that the whole thing might be a hoax. That possibility wouldn't even occur to them. After a few minutes, the students would start talking to each other. The noise level would increase. They would still think there was a technical glitch. After twenty minutes, the ones with short attention spans would lose interest and start to leave the auditorium. But only a few would leave. Most of them would be stomping their feet and chanting "Strength through discipline!"
In Mr. Jones's imagination - and here I mean Mr. Jones the author of the story, not Mr. Jones the speaker at the rally - the audience is so receptive to his message that they have already anticipated most of it before he tells them. In his imagination, as he sits at his desk writing the story, they catch on immediately that there is no leader, and then it dawns on them: of course, we should have known! In Mr. Jones's imagination the students already know, in their heart of hearts, that they are guilty, and it only remains for him to spell it out while they sit there in meek silence.
In reality, he would be facing a crowd - not an audience, a crowd - of 200 teenagers who have been worked up to a fever pitch of excitement and then disappointed. If he tried to tell them there was no leader, they wouldn't believe him. At least not at first. Most of them don't even know Mr. Jones. They heard about the leader from their friends, and in their minds he exists independently of Mr. Jones. If Mr. Jones did convince them that the rally was a hoax, perhaps by showing them that there was no cable feeding into the TV, the reaction would be anger. When they realized that they had been set up and lied to, they would feel anything but guilty.
Now we come to the crux of the matter. When he told them the rally was to remain a secret, all 200 students heard what he said and got the message. This is the most unrealistic thing in the whole story. "If our enactment of the Fascist mentality is complete not one of you will ever admit to being at this final Third Wave rally."
And then at the very end he says
"And as predicted (!) we also shared a deep secret. In the four years I taught at Cubberley High School no one ever admitted to attending the Third Wave Rally."
If there was a rally, there would be no question of "admitting" anything. With 200 students missing from 4th period class, it would be obvious who was there and who wasn't
We are supposed to believe that 200 out of 200 students (the same ones described in problem #4) followed this train of thought and accepted the conclusion.