What was all about?
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.
You can watch it again and answer the following questions:
What do you think about the teacher?
Do you think his experiment in class was a good way to teach fascism?
What do you think about the students?
Which student do you think that took part of the wave more seriously? Why?
What do you think about the girl who did not agree with the wave?
How do you think she felt?
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