"The Third Wave" Wave, pt. 3: Five More Neglected Bits of Information
Including my analysis of what actually happened during "The Third Wave" experiment in Cubberley High School, 1967
Note: this post is the second part of a lengthy investigation into what actually happened during the infamous Third Wave social experiment, and the third part of my overall series on the Third Wave Experiment as an example of modern metapolitical folklore. For Part 1, click here. For Part 2, click here.
Welcome back. When we last left off, I had listed five important bits of information for understanding the Third Wave experiment. In this essay, I’ll include five more, plus my actual analysis of what really occurred during the week-and-a-half period in which the “Third Wave” took place. But just to refresh your memory (and repost the hyperlinks in a convenient place), my main sources besides Ron Jones’s original “Take as Directed” essay originally published in Co-Evolution Quarterly (1976) are a 2011 interview with Ron Jones; Lesson Plan, a 2010 documentary about the event; the 2012 testimony of former student Sherry Tousley; and the late blogger Lyle Burkhead’s analysis as well as his collection of student testimonies and contemporary school newspaper photos.
Now, let’s get on with the next five important bits of information.
6. Other kids did skip their own classes to attend Ron Jones’s class, though they didn’t sit down in their seats as Jones had first instructed.
In Jones’s original essay, he says that other kids were skipping class just to participate in the Third Wave experiment. As he puts it, “By Thursday the class had swollen in size to over eighty students. The only thing that allowed them all to fit was the enforced discipline of sitting in silence at attention.” As I implied in the previous installment, the number seems exaggerated. But they also weren’t all sitting down in the way Jones had instructed on the first day, which required being seated at their desks. In Lesson Plan, Sherry Tousley recalls walking by one of Jones’s classes even though she had been banished to the library, and she says that she only could see the class out of the corner of her eye. But, she continues, “To my shock, what I noticed was just standing-room only in the class. The room was absolutely packed.” Jo Ann Wood adds, “Everyone who couldn’t find a seat pulled up a piece of floor. It was amazing. And there were always people waiting to get in, y’know, out of the door.”
This might seem like a trifling detail, but just imagine this picture for a moment. You’ve got a class filled with students, many of which aren’t even supposed to be there, and a bunch of them are sitting down on the floor, perhaps standing, with other students scrambling to get into the class, waiting around in the hallway to see if they can find room. And no one is forcing them to leave and attend the classes they’re meant to attend. Is this really the picture of authoritarian discipline that Jones paints for us in his first account? It is not, and later on, I will quote a letter by a student who visited the class and also did not perceive an environment of authoritarianism.
7. Students did indeed rebel against Jones’s Third Wave movement.
Here is where we get into the most shameful aspect of Jones’s recollection. Recall that when he describes his conversation with a rabbi about his experiment, the rabbi encourages him, and Jones says, “If only he would have raged in anger or simply investigated the situation I could point the students to an example of righteous rebellion. But no.” The unstated claim being that there were no examples of righteous rebellion that Jones could present to the students as an example of correct moral behavior. This is a lie. The most outspoken student who rebelled against Jones was the aforementioned Sherry Tousley, who is prominently featured in Lesson Plan. According to her account from her web site,
Many students were not in the room when I arrived early to class. I stood and asked, “Mr. Jones, why can’t we just say what we think? Why do we have to report on each other for expressing opinions?”
He pointed at me and declared, “You, to the library for the rest of the semester!” I was stunned. My first thought was of the “F” I would receive. The next was a profound and familiar sense of isolation. I had moved nine times between the U.S. and Europe and from coast to coast by the age of thirteen due to my father’s career. This was my first year living in California. What little sense of belonging I had in this place instantly dissolved and the old vulnerabilities of being the new kid, the outsider, returned. I walked to the library in a state of dejection and fear.
She then collaborated with the school librarian on making a series of anti-Third Wave posters. She called her counter-movement “The Breakers,” and she spent her time making nearly fifty posters that she plastered all over the school. Although they were torn down, she continued to make more throughout the weekend and the following week. With the help of her father who drove her there, she ransacked Ron Jones’s classroom, i.e. the “Third Wave headquarters,” by taking down their posters and putting up hers. She even got the principal to let her make an anti-Third Wave announcement on the school’s intercom.
Now, here’s where things get really interesting. When the experiment was finally done, Jones had no appreciation for anything Tousley did at all. Here is her description of what happened during and after the big concluding rally:
Rather than involving students in a discussion on the experience, Mr. Jones spent the final twenty minutes of that hour engaging in what I found reproach, denouncement and humiliation. In a room of students showing signs of grief and shame, Mr. Jones lectured them about their failure to do anything to stand up against the movement. He compared them to the Nazis and reprimanded them for how special, how much better they believed they were than those who were not in the movement. A group of young men had skipped two weeks of classes to act as Mr. Jones’ body guards. I recall him telling them they were the biggest fools of all. His manner was, in my opinion, seething and relentless.
I finally asked him quietly what he thought of what I had done. His response was an angry, “You didn’t do anything!”
“Wh-what about the posters?” I asked. Astonishment appeared on his face as he learned one person had made all of the posters. When he discovered I had been responsible for the public service announcement against the movement, he wanted to know what faculty member had signed the form to allow it. When I told him the principal had signed it, his face grew angrier. Upon learning I had been the one to get into “headquarters” the previous evening, he looked at me with derision and walked away.
If I had to guess why Jones reacted the way he did, my guess would be that he was annoyed at Tousley simply because she disproved his own hypothesis about student conformity and essentially ruined the lesson he was trying to teach. In other words, she bruised his ego.
Tousley, by the way, never felt that Jones’s Third Wave experiment had great educational value. In a response to a comment on her blog, she says,
Some students did see the Third Wave as a powerful learning tool as documented in the film “The Lesson Plan.” However I believe other students, like me, did not experience it as such. These voices went largely unheard in the film.
And in a Q&A session following a Lesson Plan screening, she makes her opposition to Ron Jones’s pedagogy clear, even when standing right near him:
I think a profound learning experience was lost. I think a transformative moment was lost in that the situation was not handled in a loving or compassionate way. It was a loss of a teaching moment that [Jones] was not able to hear that one student had done the very things that he would have wanted the students to do.
But Tousley may not have been the only one who rebelled against the Third Wave movement. According to the Cubberley Catamount article from 1967 by Bill Klink, just a few weeks after the experiment took place, Ron Jones’s
fifth period senior government class launched the most successful coup d’etat on Wednesday, April 5, the last day of the movement, as they kidnapped Jones and threatened to deliver lectures on democracy to his sophomore classes. However, he persuaded them to let him go, telling them he had planned to end the movement that day with a rally at lunch.
When I first read this passage, I found the idea absurd. But if we interpret the word “kidnap” liberally — perhaps indicating that they just held Jones after class, shut the door, and didn’t let him leave until they made their point — then it becomes more plausible. If there’s any truth to this claim at all, then we have another example of righteous rebellion. Unfortunately, however, we don’t have any direct testimony from students in Jones’s senior government class.
I’ll sum up this sub-section with part of a letter to Lyle Burkhead from Hal Sampson, a former student who was the school’s newspaper photographer along with his friend Bill Parrish. He writes,
I can also confirm Bill Parrish's account of the "Breakers", a counter-movement started by a female student. One evening, they removed the Third Wave banners and put Breakers banners in their place in Jones' classroom. The counter-movement was, of course, left out of Ron's telling for best effect.
One reason that Ron's story doesn't ring true is that rebellious, anti-authoritarian, skeptical teenagers are actually one of nature's antidotes to mind viruses such as the "Third Wave" that Ron Jones experimented with. Meme infection actually takes years of indoctrination starting with younger, much more gullible targets. A week of slogans, even from a teacher with the power to flunk you if you don't appear to conform, won't leave any lasting tracks in a teenager's blossoming brain.
Not a bad analysis.
8. Students got into fights over the Third Wave, but not for the reasons you’d think.
One interesting thing about Ron Jones’s “Take as Directed” essay is that he omits probably the most damning fact about the Third Wave movement, which is that it did apparently inspire real violence between students. This leads me to suspect that although Jones claims he had many “informants” snitching to him about other students, he didn’t get as much dirt on what was going on as perhaps he thought.
In 2006, the former student Rick Schloss wrote to Lyle Burkhead that he almost got into a fight with two students who were trying to recruit him to join The Third Wave:
My only experience with The Wave was when I passed by an enrollment table sitting in the hallway one day. As I walked by it I was approached by a couple of the Wave members that wanted to know if I would join. They couldn't explain to me what it was they were trying to accomplish, all they could do was to repeat those lines about unity and strength. Since I never have been a joiner of groups, I passed. This was met with aggressiveness on their part, attempting to block my path and wanting to know my name. One of the guys actually pulled out a small note pad. We almost came to blows at that moment and I don't recall what stopped the escalation, but I knew I was willing to go the distance with these two.
Four years later, he showed up in Lesson Plan, repeating the same story. This isn’t an instance of actual violence, but other students claim that violence occurred in the same documentary. According to Philip Neel, who is presented speaking mid-sentence (my emphasis),
My only feelings at that point were that we were in the right and the people who were picking the fights were in the wrong… that somehow they weren’t really seeing what we were up to was nothing bad, it had a lot of energy and a lot of excitement and a lot of purpose. So when I heard that other students were resis… y’know, were fighting Third Wave members, my feeling was just that, well, they just don’t know enough about what we’re doing, and if they knew, then they probably would want to join.
If you pay close attention, Neel is indicating that the violence was actually coming from the outsiders directed against the Third Wave members, not the reverse, which means the Third Wave members were the ones being persecuted. And it isn’t clear if he’s referring to the story from Schloss, which may have gotten exaggerated as it was related to him back then, or some other fight that really did happen.
But there is another story of actual violence from Third Wave members against a non-member. In Lesson Plan, during the Third Wave reunion scene, an uncredited gentleman who was a student journalist for The Cubberley Catamount (maybe Bill Klink?) says that he was trying to do research on the Third Wave movement during its first week. According to him, “That Thursday, two members of the Car Club came into the journalism office, and they knocked the breath out of me and told me not to write about it.”
On its face, the fact that violence broke out would seem like the greatest affirmation of the idea that Ron Jones’s experiment has valuable lessons to teach us about fascism. But it doesn’t look like this violence was a one-way phenomenon; it ran both ways. On the one hand, some students wanted to fight Third Wave members because they were pushy and annoying. On the other hand, two Third Wave members apparently terrorized a student journalist. Before we move on, I think it’s worth touching upon those two students, since there’s more complexity here than what you’d expect.
Those two students were a member of “The Executers,” Cubberley High School’s Car Club, and much is made of the fact that some of them volunteered to be Ron Jones’s private guards all the way up to the final rally. Here is a letter that one Car Club member sent Lyle Burkhead on July 29, 2008, and I’m going to quote it in its entirety, since it certainly paints a picture (my emphasis):
My name is Bob Warford and I graduated from Cubberley in 1968. I ran across your website by accident, I was looking for info on my 40th re-union. I remember the silliness of Mr. Jones' class, though was not a member. I wrote a gossip thing for the Catamount that ran each week for 3 years and Mr. Jones' antics were a good source of humor. I also was a member of the Executers (those "car club toughs" he mentions) but how could any upper-middle class softies be called tough is beyond me. Later in life we learned what that word meant, but much like his retelling of the Wave, we were in Suburbian lala land back then. The only African Americans we saw had to be bused in and we weren't allowed to buy bananas at the local super market because they thought we would smoke the peel, I'm not sure how that would work, but its true.
We all laughed at Jones.
1. In 1966 he had a member of the American Nazi Party as a guest at Cubberley. The Nazi was put down by tough questions and a lot of noise from the more learned students. I spoofed it in my column.
2. Jones's Basket Ball team (the one he coached) got into some light weight trouble because they were playing too physical. I found it a bit ridiculous as they were just a "B" squad, somewhere below Junior Varsity, and wrote about it also.
3. The Executers who were in Jones's class, (Sophomores at the time and the Executers had only a few Sophs) didn't take any of the Wave stuff seriously and I walked in on the class twice with Joe Baldwin (another Executer) without anyone interfering. Joe and I were there to witness and report in the Catamount about the Wave. What I saw was a lot of kids having fun laughing at an off-center teacher.
4. Cubberley was in the center of the War protest movement, Affirmative Action Student Busing, the SDS and other serious events, but also some not quite so noble, such as an art teacher trying to sleep with his students, a history teacher sharing weed with his, a drama teacher from Mars. Jones fit right in with his peers.
Palo Alto Unified tried several inovative things in the world of education as did many college town, liberal systems. Some in retrospect were just silly including phonetic spelling classes and the Wave. Jones may have made a name and a few bucks retelling it, but like Paul Simon wrote and sang, "Kodachrome...makes all the world seem like a sunny day."
If it was half as dramatic as he retold it, it would have been front page news. Hell, it didn't even make the Palo Alto Times.
Just one 58 year old's perspective.
Bob Warford
Now, if this letter is to be believed, there were just a few sophomores in the Executers, and they didn’t take Jones or the Third Wave seriously at all. Yet they also apparently punched a student journalist in the gut on Thursday of its first week. There could be a contradiction here, but not necessarily. If I had to guess why it happened, I’d say that they didn’t want him to report on the Third Wave and expose it, jeopardizing what they perceived as their ability to get A’s for the semester while doing no real work. But when their friends from the Car Club came in to report on it, they allowed that because they trusted them more.
9. The Third Wave rally bore little resemblance to what Jones described.
In “Take as Directed,” Jones indicates that when he finally assembled all of the Third Wave members into the hall for his bogus Third Wave rally, some friends of his attended, pretending to be members of the press, and they took pictures of the rally. Guards from the Car Club were placed at the entrance door. Third Wave banners “hung like clouds.” And importantly, over 200 students attended. This description is dishonest in multiple ways. First, Jones makes it seem as though his experiment only happened with one class of 30 students, but we know that it happened with three classes of around 30 students each, so that explains why 90 would show up. But then there’s another 110 whose presence he would need to explain. And the best explanation is, they don’t exist. Jones heavily exaggerated the number of attendees.
Here is former student Hal Sampson again in a letter to Lyle Burkhead from 2003:
I was also a photographer for the Cubberley school newspaper and was sent to cover a story on a tip from the journalism teacher about "Ron Jones planning something during the lunch hour at a classroom (at the NE end of the G wing)". The room holds about 100-150 students. (Cubberley High is now Foothill College Middlefield Campus.)
I entered the back door after most of the others (presumably from Jones' classes) were already seated. The classroom was about two-thirds full. The room was dark and no "guards" questioned me or my camera. There were no banners hung in the room. After a few others came in and sat down, Ron Jones turned on a TV set showing only static "snow" and left the room.
The room was initially quiet except for a few whispers among the students and a hiss from the TV. After a few minutes, there were impatient rumblings and increasing waves of students got up and left. I then left as well, as there didn't appear to be anything to photograph. Only 40-50 students could have been left in the room after I left.
Then, in a follow-up message, he writes,
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...
My mom, who attended a lecture there [in the room where the rally took place] much more recently than I have, estimates the capacity at about 100 seats in 6 or so tiers. The room is about 30 feet by 50 feet, with the front 1/4 to 1/3 a lecture area with no seats where the about 21 inch TV was located.
Now, this is important, because two of the students from Lesson Plan, Steve Coniglio and Philip Neel, both seem to confirm Jones’s account that 200 students showed up, though they word it unusually. Neel says “By now… it felt like there were 200 students there,” and Coniglio says, “My assumption is maybe 200. It might’ve been less. All I know, [the room] was filled up.” Throughout the documentary, both students indicate that they have great admiration for Jones (Neel was in fact a co-director), and their memories seem to be influenced by Jones’s essay at various points of the film. For instance, when Neel explains the name of the Third Wave movement, he uses the same phrase “beach lore” that Jones uses to explain the concept in “Take as Directed,” indicating that he knows the essay well enough to have absorbed Jones’s precise wording. That both students could overestimate the holding capacity of this room by 75 people, essentially taking Ron Jones’s word over their own observational skills, suggests that their trust in Jones is so strong that it has compromised their ability to interpret not only that particular event but the entire experiment. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that they are two of the most prominently featured interview subjects in the documentary.
What was once Cubberley High School, and then later the Foothill College Middlefield Campus, is now the Cubberley Community Center as of the date of this writing. If you go to their web site, it says that room H-1, where the rally took place, has a space of 1,900 square feet and a capacity of 125 people. This is what it looks like:
In his second letter, Hal Sampson was off by 400 feet and 25 people, but that’s still pretty close — way closer than Jones’s recollection. Therefore, I think Sampson’s testimony is more reliable.
Confirming Sampson’s claim that people left the rally early, both Steve Coniglio and Russel Mulock say that they left the rally before Ron Jones revealed that it was a trick, because they were afraid. Of what, though, it isn’t clear. Coniglio says he felt like a Jew who had been led into a gas chamber, but it’s hard to gauge whether or not that’s really how he felt at the time. Maybe he was just afraid he’d get yelled at, in which case his premonition would have been correct. But whatever the reason, this account bolster’s Sampson’s testimony.
Jones makes a few claims in his account that are not corroborated by any other sources besides himself. He says that before he gave his big speech, the students were muttering to themselves, “Strength through discipline, strength through unity” while the television was showing static, as if to practice self-reassurance through the repetition of mantras. No one else confirms this. And he also says that after the TV had been showing static for a few minutes, he showed the students images of Hitler, Nazi rallies, and the Holocaust, saying to them, “Let me show you your future!” (in the TV special, he says, “There’s your leader!”) Again, no one else confirms this. Although I haven’t found any contradictory testimony, I suspect that both of these claims are lies. I don’t believe any images of Hitler were ever shown. Jones claims that he had prepared the rear screen projector to show a montage of Nazi footage behind the television. This seems like a somewhat cumbersome task to pull off, and it prompts a number of questions. Did Jones edit the montage himself? Where did he get the film reel? To me, this just seems to be a fictional detail that he inserted into his essay for climactic effect, and it was so powerful that it was adapted into the ABC Afterschool Special.
What is rather clear, though, is that while Jones was haranguing his students, some of them were brought to tears, as multiple students confirm. That’s not hard to believe. I remember being in one rather silly and melodramatic high school assembly about the horrors of drunk driving that caused some of the girls to cry. But it’s also evident that Sampson’s analysis is correct in that not everyone took the situation so seriously. As Philip Neel indicates,
I remember some students crying, some students having to hold each other… I remember one guy walking by going, “Oh, I knew it was a joke all along.” I don’t think he felt that way, honestly.
It would be interesting to hear other accounts of what actually happened at the rally, but the factual details provided by even Jones’s most gullible students are still fairly incriminating.
10. Ron Jones did not lose his job over The Third Wave experiment.
On multiple occasions, it has been said that Ron Jones lost his job due to the Third Wave experiment. For instance, in this 2010 article from the SF Gate, the very first paragraph states that the Third Wave experiment “ended up costing Jones his job and his future as a high school teacher.” Additionally, in Lesson Plan, Jones says, “I was never allowed to teach again following The Wave.” Again, this is a lie.
In the December 8, 1967 issue of The Cubberley Catamount, there’s a story about Ron Jones doing another simulation in which he was posing as a member of the Students for a Democratic Society in order to teach some kind of lesson about China in the 1900s.
Clearly, after the Third Wave experiment was finished, he was not only able to return for another year of teaching, but he continued to do simulation exercises. He was fired shortly afterwards, but not for anything directly associated with the Third Wave. In Lesson Plan, former Cubberley High School principal Dr. Scott Thomson explains why:
I don’t think [the Third Wave] got out of control as a methodology or as a unit for learning. I thought it got out of control when he then took that learning and tried to apply it to his contemporary school. He was actually coaching the United Student Movement which had nothing to do directly with his class. But that’s what I think is the immorality of what Ron Jones did. He took his advantage as a teacher with a guaranteed audience of young people to try to indoctrinate them. He wasn’t teaching them, he was indoctrinating them. And that’s what I think his mistake was. It’s his purpose — his intent rather than the actual teaching was the problem.
Although Jones had claimed that the Third Wave experiment got him fired, a year later he changed his tune in his interview with The Commentator:
Two years after [The Wave] I was kind of asked to leave that school. […] I don’t think it was actually [connected]. People always think it had to be. But in fact the school went on for another two years. And I was probably dismissed for being involved in the war in Vietnam, for being involved in the protests against the war.
[…]
I was the head of the Black Student Union; that was interesting. And then I was head of a group called the United Student Movement. When I say I was the head of—for these groups to exist on campus they had to have a faculty sponsor. So I gave them that privilege of being on campus and speaking out, but I think that challenged some of the traditional teachers. They didn’t want a Black Student Union on campus. They did not want protest to the war on campus.
It’s ultimately a good thing that Jones eventually was honest about it, and he also never made the claim in his original essay about the experience. But then, why did he lie about it in the first place? Being fired is a pretty big change, so it beggars belief to imagine that he just forgot the reason why. The more likely explanation is that Jones has a flair for the dramatic and rarely misses an opportunity to exaggerate or distort the record if it can help tell a more riveting story.
Conclusion - My Analysis
Having meticulously pored over every useful source I could find (that is, without having to interview anyone myself), I feel at least somewhat qualified to give my theory on what actually happened with the Third Wave experiment and what, if any, pedagogical value this extended activity might provide. So here it is. The Third Wave movement, while it was meant to be an elaborate lesson about authoritarianism and the Nazi regime, did not resemble those things in practice, and thus it carries no such lesson. The notion that the Third Wave movement has anything to do with the Holocaust is downright absurd.
The Third Wave movement was instead an extended activity that started off reasonably well but gradually got out of hand. And it didn’t get out of hand for the reasons that Ron Jones and his most supportive students have stated, either. Jones wasn’t drunk with power, and his students weren’t ready to put on authoritarian jackboots and then go gas some Jews, or whatever. It got out of hand because Ron Jones lost control of his own classroom, the students were given too much autonomy, and they started to abuse it. Whatever discipline the students showed in the first few days disappeared over time. Jones lost his sense of direction as the activity went on, he lost sight of the activity’s original purpose, he increasingly got frustrated by the recklessness of the students, and then finally he intended to take it out on them by screaming about the Nazis — aggressively bringing everyone back to the original point of the exercise but without any real justification for it.
If the Third Wave movement bears resemblance to any historical movement, it would be closer to the French Revolution (with Cubberley High School itself resembling the monarchy) than the Nazi party. The former student Mark Hancock indicated that by the end of the Third Wave experiment, his class section was engaging in show trials where the students would accuse another of not following some Third Wave rule. Ron Jones acted as the judge, and then the student would be banished to the library if she were declared guilty. Such a situation resembles the Revolutionary Tribunal (with Jones acting as Robespierre) more than it resembles anything Hitler did. But even having said that, I think such a comparison gives the whole experiment far too much credit. It seems that it devolved into a confused mess by the end, too confused to merit any moral lesson save perhaps “don’t do simulation activities that last so long.” The truth is, The Third Wave is a story about a teacher who slowly lost control of his three class periods and then took a desperate measure to regain it. The Third Wave is a story about Ron Jones and how he got played by his own students.
Beyond all of the information I’ve given thus far, I’m confident in my view partly because you can tell that Jones’s students themselves indicate that they lost sense of what was going on by the end of that week-and-a-half period, completely forgetting the activity’s putative purpose. According to Philip Neel, one of the reasons that he and some of the other students were tricked by Ron Jones when he said that The Third Wave was a real political movement was because they knew Jones was politically outspoken on the left (it is, after all, the reason he got fired). Steve Coniglio’s testimony also corroborates this. People were concerned about the Vietnam war, and the students who believed that The Third Wave might be real only did so because they thought it might be some sort of left-wing war protest movement. Neel says this explicitly:
That afternoon [when the rally was announced], when I was walking in the corridors, I saw a lot of the students — the senior students who were the long-haired radical protestors who had cut classes to come to the Third Wave — I heard them in the hallway saying, “We’re gonna get the pigs out of Washington. We’re gonna get us out of Vietnam.”
He doesn’t specify if they were actually talking about the Third Wave rally or not, but he claims that this sentiment motivated him to go to the rally. I also wouldn’t be surprised if Jones himself interspersed his own left-wing views and ideas into the activity as it went on, thus convoluting the whole thing even further. But even if not, I would still pose the question: if the students thought that the Third Wave might be a left-wing Vietnam war protest movement, then did Jones do a good job of establishing it as an authoritarian fascist simulation?
Additionally, all of the facts indicate that Ron Jones’s classes were less authoritarian in nature than the other classes occurring in the school. The Third Wave students didn’t take tests, didn’t have to deal with quizzes, there’s little indication that they had homework, and they set their own activities for the day in a bottom-up fashion. Even Jones himself contrasts the Third Wave against the school’s own authoritarian structure in his essay “Take as Directed.” Towards the end, he says,
The Third Wave was disrupting normal learning. Students were cutting class to participate and the school counselors were beginning to question every student in the class. The real gestapo in the school was at work.
While many of the essay’s original readers must have dismissed the last sentence as a cute joke — some throwaway line of no real consequence — I don’t see it that way. If the Third Wave was supposedly authoritarian yet also represented a favorable alternative to “the real gestapo,” then what the hell was it supposed to be?
The way the rally was handled also demonstrates the Third Wave’s confused message and dubious moral lesson. Ron Jones supposedly told his smartest and highest achieving female students that they’re not allowed to attend the Third Wave rally, so they didn’t go. Perhaps he consciously wanted to spare them. But as for the other students, Jones’s intention was to humiliate and yell at them for being such conformist Nazi-like sheep. This clearly did not happen as planned, however. As noted before, the former student Hal Sampson estimates that over half the students left before Ron Jones even walked to the front to give his big speech. Mark Hancock indicates that he was one of the students who left early in this interview. Russel Mulock and Steve Coniglio state that they left as well. Interestingly, Coniglio’s reason as to why he did suggests that the Third Wave’s moral purpose was totally lost on him. Instead of thinking, “Wow, I’ve been a fascist this whole time! Darn!” he instead supposedly felt like a Jew in a concentration camp and ran away. I don’t believe this misinterpretation of the rally’s moral intent is Coniglio’s fault, though. When Ron Jones finally yelled at the students, he was yelling at the ones who trusted him the most and probably behaved themselves the best, causing some of them to cry. The more cynical students — the ones who were simply approaching the Third Wave movement to get an A — would have left the rally along with the fearful ones by the time Jones even gave his speech. And yet, decades later, some of these loyal students who stayed around only to get yelled at still remain steadfast in their loyalty to Jones.
The students who deeply believe in the pedagogical value of the Third Wave experiment, all the way up to and including the rally at the end, probably do so because they respect the moral meaning that Jones affixed to it. In other words, they have allowed what they perceive as the righteousness of Jones’s intentions to supersede every lingering doubt. But looking at the facts such as they are, I don’t see how one could conclude that this Third Wave rally was anything but a total botch. A badly executed failure to cap off a badly executed classroom experiment. And, as Sherry Tousley has indicated, Jones didn’t even hold up the rebellious students — i.e. the ones who rejected “The Third Wave” from the beginning or who frequently got sent to the library — as examples to follow, which only further suggests the convoluted nature of the simulation and the lack of clarity in Jones’s thought process by the end of it.
When Ron Jones sat down to write his account of the Third Wave experiment nine years after it took place, I think he had more motivation to do so than merely the fact that he had been reminded of it by Steve Coniglio. As mentioned before, my guess is that he was strongly influenced by the success of Philip Zimbardo’s “Stanford Prison Experiment” (I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Zimbardo himself appears on the Lesson Plan documentary, either), and so Jones wrote out a heavily embellished account of his Third Wave experiment, filled with glaring omissions and outright falsehoods, in an attempt to create a thematic parallel between what he did and what Zimbardo claimed to have done — probably unaware that Zimbardo was also a liar and a fraud. His plan worked, the TV producer (and political propagandist) Norman Lear read his essay in the Co-Evolution Quarterly, he turned the essay into a made-for-TV movie, and the Third Wave myth continued to grow. And, in fact, his plan worked so well that his most loyal students allowed his account to impact their own memories of the event that they had beforehand.
At this point, I feel compelled to make a brief statement about Ron Jones himself, since I’ve spent some considerable time with him for the last few weeks, at least in some way. I don’t believe that Ron Jones is a bad person. If you look at his career on paper, he has led the life of a respectable citizen. He has worked with physically and mentally disabled people for 30 years (something most experienced people would consider a fairly thankless task), he has been an active participant in his community for most of his life, and he seems to believe earnestly in making the world a better place. Even when he was fired from Cubberley High School, many of the students and their parents rose to his defense and demanded to know why. Such a gesture speaks to how beloved he was at the school despite being so controversial. But human beings are complex by nature, and two seemingly opposed things can be true at once. I think that Ron Jones is ultimately a decent person, yes, but he’s also undeniably a bullshitter. I suspect he knows that his account is filled with nonsense, and yet he has allowed the myth of The Third Wave to continue for so long because he feels it serves a just purpose. The Third Wave has become an effective piece of Holocaust propaganda, and it’s a story that every German citizen is required to know. This blog isn’t about making state and/or educational policy prescriptions, so I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if its current usage in the German school system is merited, given everything we now know about how bogus Jones’s original account actually is.
This series will continue with an examination of The Third Wave’s fictionalized adaptations. What happens when fiction is fictionalized even further? Tune in next week, and we’ll find out.