The teacher’s name was Ron Jones. He was 25 years old and in his first year of teaching at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California. His class was tenth-grade world history, and the unit he was working through in early April 1967 was Nazi Germany. A student, whose identity has never been formally confirmed, asked him a question he could not answer from the textbook or from anything he had learned in his own education. How did ordinary Germans go along with what happened? And how could they claim, afterwards, that they had not known?
Jones tried to explain it. Then he tried to explain it a different way. Then he gave up on explaining it, and decided to try to demonstrate it instead.
What he actually did
On the Monday morning in early April 1967, Jones walked into his classroom and wrote three words on the chalkboard: STRENGTH THROUGH DISCIPLINE. He told his students they were going to try something new for a day. He would be in charge. They would follow along. The rules were simple. Students would sit at attention before the bell rang. They would stand up to ask or answer any question. They would preface every remark to him with the words “Mr. Jones.” Every answer would be three words or fewer.
Jones drilled them on their compliance for the rest of the class period, and, as documented by the official Wave Home archive maintained by original participants in the experiment, his students responded with a level of enthusiasm and precision that surprised him. He had planned to end the experiment at the end of that Monday. He didn’t. By Tuesday, he had added a second phrase to the chalkboard, given the movement a name, and taught his students a salute. By Wednesday, students from other classes were asking to join. By Thursday, roughly two hundred students across the school were saluting each other in hallways, wearing white shirts as an informal uniform, and reporting classmates who broke the rules.
Jones realised, on the Thursday evening, that he had lost the ability to end the experiment gracefully. He also realised, uncomfortably, that the experiment had worked.
For a full breakdown of this insane story, check out this video.
Why it worked
The mechanism Jones had stumbled into is not, on the accumulated evidence of subsequent social psychology, complicated. What his movement offered its participants was a very specific set of things that human beings appear to find deeply attractive when their ordinary environment is not providing them. Clear rules. A sense of belonging to a group that is doing something meaningful. Immediate feedback on whether they were doing well. A stated superiority over people outside the group. And permission, indeed active encouragement, to enforce compliance on others.
The individual pleasures of participation, on the reports of former students who have spoken publicly about the experiment since the 1990s, were substantial. Being part of the movement felt good. Wearing the uniform felt good. Giving the salute felt good. Reporting a rule-breaker felt good. Even the students who were vaguely uncomfortable with what was happening kept participating, because pulling out would have meant losing access to the specific set of goods the movement was providing.
A 2020 peer-reviewed analysis by the Finnish education researcher Antti Saari, published in the Springer Handbook of Theory and Research in Cultural Studies and Education and archived by the Perpetrator Studies Network at Utrecht University, argues that what Jones had accidentally activated in his students was a psychological process called transference. Students in an authoritarian classroom, on Saari’s Lacanian reading, treat the teacher as someone who possesses privileged knowledge about who they are and how they should act. When the teacher offers a clear set of rules for being a good student, the students accept those rules not primarily because the rules make sense, but because accepting them lets them feel more complete as people. Saari’s analysis frames what happened at Cubberley not as an isolated aberration but as a structural feature of classroom authority itself, dialled up to a specific and dangerous intensity.
The question of how ordinary Germans went along with the Nazi regime, as it turned out, was not primarily a question about Germans, or even about Nazis. It was a question about what happens to normal people when a specific set of social conditions is created around them, in a specific order, over a specific short period of time. What Jones had accidentally demonstrated is that those conditions can be reproduced, in a mild form, in an American high school in Palo Alto in less than a week.
What happened next
By Thursday evening, Jones understood that he had a problem. His students were not treating the movement as a classroom exercise anymore. They had started informing on each other outside school. They had started designing banners. They had started recruiting members from other schools. One student had volunteered, without being asked, to become Jones’s personal bodyguard. Another had proposed that dissenting students be banished from the classroom.
Jones had one day left to end an experiment that was, by every measurable indicator, still growing. He decided he needed to do something that would show his students, in a single unforgettable moment, exactly what they had been part of for the past four days.
What he did on Friday, and how those two hundred students reacted, is the part of the story that most people who hear about the Third Wave remember for the rest of their lives. The full account is documented in the historical record on Wikipedia, but the specific texture of what actually happened, and what it felt like to be one of the students in that room, is best understood watching Ron Jones and his former students describe it in their own words.
The story is worth knowing the ending of.
