In April 1967, a history teacher walked into his classroom at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, wrote three words on the chalkboard — STRENGTH THROUGH DISCIPLINE — and told his sophomore world history class they were going to try something new. By Thursday afternoon, an estimated 200 students were snapping a cupped-hand salute in the corridors, wearing white shirts as uniforms, and reporting classmates who broke the rules of a movement Jones had invented on the spot four days earlier. He called it The Third Wave. The teacher’s name was Ron Jones, and he lost control of the experiment almost immediately.
He shut it down on Friday. Two years later, Cubberley let him go.
The question that started it
Jones was teaching the Nazi period. A student — accounts differ on who — asked him something he could not answer from a textbook: how did ordinary Germans go along with it, and then insist afterward that they had not known?
Jones was, by every account, the kind of teacher other students snuck into class to watch. Simulation was fashionable pedagogy in 1967. He decided to simulate the answer.
The plan, as he later described it to The Mercury News, was one day of strict discipline to show the class what it felt like. Then he would explain the trick and move on. He gave himself a Monday.
Day one: strength through discipline
Jones drilled the class on posture — feet flat, back straight against the chair. Students had to stand beside their desks and address him formally before speaking. They practiced entering the room in silence. They practiced sitting down without a sound.
The rules were small, almost silly. The class took to them immediately. Jones was surprised by how much they seemed to enjoy it.
There is something worth pausing on there. When someone else decides exactly how you sit and speak and behave, a lot of small daily uncertainties simply drop out. The students were not being forced. They were being relieved of the effort of choosing.
Day two: strength through community
Jones came in on Tuesday expecting the novelty to have worn off. Instead the class was already at attention before the bell — spines straight, hands folded, waiting.
So he pushed. He added a second slogan to the board: STRENGTH THROUGH COMMUNITY. He gave the thing a name, The Third Wave, and taught them a salute — a cupped right hand raised to the shoulder, a curl that resembled a breaking wave. Members were to use it whenever they saw each other, in class or out.
By the end of Tuesday, students were saluting in the hallways. Kids who were not in Jones’s class began asking how to join.
Day three: strength through action
On Wednesday Jones added the third slogan and started issuing membership cards. Some cards were marked with a red X — those students were to act as monitors, reporting anyone who criticized the movement or broke the rules.
The classroom filled with over 40 students. Students from other classes were cutting their own lessons to attend. Jones started assigning tasks: recruit new members, teach the salute correctly, design a banner. According to accounts collected for the documentary Lesson Plan, more than 200 students at Cubberley were participating by the end of the third day.
The reporting mechanism was the part Jones later said unsettled him most. He did not have to ask twice. Students volunteered names.
Day four: the vanguard
On Thursday, Jones told the class the Third Wave was not just a classroom exercise. It was, he said, part of a national youth movement. They were the vanguard — the soldiers of the future. Their presidential candidate would be revealed on Friday in a televised address broadcast to Third Wave chapters across the country. All members were to assemble in the school auditorium at noon.
Students showed up early, in matching white shirts, carrying homemade banners. A few had appointed themselves as Jones’s bodyguards without being asked. One student, who had been struggling academically all year, told Jones the movement had given him a purpose and stationed himself outside the classroom door as a personal guard.
Jones later admitted to SFGate in 2010 that by Thursday he was no longer running a controlled experiment and had become caught up in the excitement and power of the situation. He acknowledged being drawn to the power and attention the movement generated.
Day five: the television that wasn’t there
Around 200 students packed the auditorium at noon on Friday. Jones had rented a television. He had positioned it at the front of the room. At the appointed hour, he switched it on.
Static.
The students waited. Some stood at attention. Jones let the silence stretch. Then he cut the TV and started a slide projector. On the wall appeared images of Adolf Hitler, Nuremberg rallies, the Hitler Youth, the camps.
Jones told them they were heading down the same path as Nazi Germany. He told them they were no different from the Germans they had been studying in class.
Some students cried. Some walked out. A few refused to believe there had been no national movement at all. Jones told them to burn their membership cards and never speak of it again.
Most of them did not speak of it, for years.
What it cost the teacher
Cubberley did not fire Jones on the spot. But two years later, in 1969, his contract was not renewed. Nobody said the Third Wave was the reason. Nobody said it wasn’t. He never taught in a high school again.
He avoided the story for years. The wider public met it first through fiction: an American novelization titled The Wave, written in 1981 by Todd Strasser under the pen name Morton Rhue, became an international bestseller and a classroom staple across Europe, especially in Germany. A 2008 German feature film, Die Welle, brought the story to theaters. Jones’s own reckoning came later, when one of his former students, film editor Philip Neel, tracked down a dozen classmates and their parents and the school’s principal for a 2010 documentary called Lesson Plan. A German documentary, The Invisible Line, followed in 2019 and reached English-speaking audiences by streaming in 2020.
Jones has expressed deep regret about conducting the experiment and the dangers it posed to his students. He acknowledged that he crossed ethical boundaries and became absorbed in the power dynamics.
Why five days was enough
The Third Wave is often filed next to Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment — the trio of mid-century studies that suggested ordinary people, given the right structure, will do things they would never choose in isolation.
What separates Jones’s classroom from the other two is that it was not designed as research. There was no consent form, no debrief protocol, no control group. It was a lesson that got away from its teacher because the students wanted it to keep going. The escalation was pulled forward by the class as much as pushed by Jones. He kept raising the stakes because the room kept responding.
That is the part that stayed with him. Not that he could make teenagers salute. That they wanted to.
Institutional pressure and the psychology of following orders is a thread Space Daily has picked up before — the editorial team wrote earlier about cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev continuing to run experiments aboard Mir while the country that launched him dissolved beneath his feet. Krikalev kept following the plan because the plan was the only stable thing left. The Cubberley students, in a much smaller way, were doing something related. They were reaching for the relief of a rule.
What Palo Alto did with the memory
Cubberley High School closed in 1979. The ’50s-flattop building on Middlefield Road became a community center. The Palo Alto Unified School District has never officially memorialized the experiment. For decades, most of Jones’s former students did not tell their own children what had happened in that classroom.
The city has since become better known for other things. Mitchell Park now houses the Magical Bridge playground, an all-abilities recreational space opened in 2015 that has drawn attention from the World Economic Forum and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Two versions of the same town, roughly a mile apart, half a century between them.
When asked what he missed about teaching, Jones said he most valued being around high school students. He described students as hopeful and energetic.
The hopefulness was the raw material. That was the lesson he had not planned to teach and could not stop teaching, then or since — that the same eagerness which makes a room of sixteen-year-olds a joy to teach is also the thing that will, given a slogan and a salute and four days, carry them somewhere none of them would have gone alone.
On the Friday afternoon in April 1967 when the projector clicked off and the auditorium emptied out, the students filed back to their fifth-period classes. Some were crying. Some were angry. Most just went. The bell rang at 3:10. It was the end of the school week. The weekend was starting. Whatever the Third Wave had been, it was over — and by Monday morning, most of Cubberley had agreed, without anyone saying so, never to bring it up again.
