"The Third Wave" Wave, pt. 2: Five Neglected Bits of Information
Putting together what actually happened during "The Third Wave" experiment in Cubberley High School, 1967
This post is Part Two in a multi-part series on the impromptu social experiment known as “The Third Wave,” which I treat as an example of modern metapolitical folklore. If you are not familiar with “The Third Wave,” I would suggest you read Part One. Otherwise, feel free to continue. For Part 3, click here. Part 4, click here. Part 5, here.
Introduction
Now, if you’ve read through the first part of this discussion, you’ll have noticed that I’ve written everything up to this point using polemical rhetoric. Maybe in subsequent versions of this essay, I’ll clean it up and make it bit more neutral. But the reason why is that when I read through the first account of the Third Wave experiment — the same one that formed the basis of an ABC Afterschool Special and a YA novel, both of which teachers still force their students to watch and/or read — I find it simply impossible to take seriously. The writing is heavily melodramatic and amateurish, the dialogue is wooden and contrived, and the pedagogical value of the experiment is dubious on its face. Try as I might, I cannot take it as anything more than pure, unadulterated shmaltz.
But I also realize that I’m viewing Jones’s essay with the benefit of hindsight. For decades, many people took it at face value and thought his work carried an important message. We should forgive them. Young people back then simply were not as questioning as they are now, and as I’ve written elsewhere, people have an unprecedented awareness of how both media and propaganda work, even though everyone today usually assumes the opposite. We know now that many of the most influential social experiments have been exposed as scientifically illegitimate, and much of the Third Wave’s supposed validity has rested on the back of those experiments (Philip Zimbardo actually mentions the Third Wave in his book The Lucifer Effect (2007), and only in the late 2010s did it become well understood that his Stanford Prison Experiment was a fraud). And we also now know that Ron Jones’s written account has been highly embellished, containing both certain and probable falsehoods, some of which are so glaring that I believe they’re outright lies. Admittedly, it has taken a while to reach this point of epistemic clarity, but more information has come out over the decades which indicates that The Third Wave experiment did not prove what Ron Jones or any of his supporters believe it proves. I’m going to use this installment to give the reader a broadened understanding of what actually went on when the experiment was conducted.
To be sure, something happened that at least vaguely resembles what Ron Jones wrote. We know this because of a few sources that have come out in the last couple decades.
One is a documentary featuring some of Ron Jones’s rather enthusiastic former students called Lesson Plan: The Story of the Third Wave (2010). Although it largely argues in favor of the pedagogical value of Ron Jones’s experiment, it does feature some students who disagree.
The second source is the personal testimony of one woman named Sherry Tousley who was one of Ron Jones’s students that took place in the experiment, and she presents a different account of how it went on her own blog in 2012. Unfortunately, she died in 2013, her blog mostly went offline, and only one page on it was archived. It is still, however, very helpful.
The third is a fairly revealing interview with Ron Jones from 2011 in The Commentator, a student newspaper for Yeshiva University.
And the fourth, perhaps the most important source, is the independent research of a man named Lyle Burkhead who started a blog questioning the story in 2002 and occasionally updated it with new information until 2008. It is hard to overstate just how valuable Burkhead’s research was in giving us a sense of what really happened. It includes his own analysis, photos of contemporary stories about the event from the Cubberley High School newspaper (which themselves constitute valuable primary sources), and copious amounts of student testimony. Burkhead apparently died in 2012, and so his website is now offline and only available through archives.
Given how much effort Burkhead put into researching what really happened, you’d think he would be mentioned in the experiment’s Wikipedia page. But as of now, he is not. And the reason is solely because Burkhead was a Holocaust skeptic with sympathy for the National Socialist regime in Germany. Y’know, the Nazis. This apparently disturbed the Wikipedia editors quite a bit, as you can see in their Talk page, leading them to concoct some rather bizarre speculations about Burkhead’s intentions. One says:
I think the geniebusters link should be removed. Not because of the content of the page linked itself, but because of the "Main Third Wave page" linked to there, which contains straight antisemitism, Holocaust denial and more of the same. And Yes, I do recognize that the cited evidence there is of interest, but it might as well be all fabricated.
I also suspect that the author of the mentioned pages might be playing his own Third-Wave-like game, to teach the reader a lesson. He writes a great number of paragraphs before breaking his fascist views, to build credibility. When he states his antisemitist views, he states them in a pretty extreme way, which might be intended as a wakeup call.
Another seems to agree that the blog feels like an elaborate game designed to test the reader’s faith:
It scared me a little. I read the entire page, and he uses SO MUCH logic and common sense in the early paragraphs that you start to feel very comfortable around him. But then suddenly Holocaust and Judaism is drafted into the picture - and suddenly all common sense vanishes. […] Was kinda frightening realizing half way through what it was really all about, having just become really accustomed to him - especially his describing himself as an outsider and an explorer of various alternate forms of consciousness, which I found myself identifying with. It's interesting that way he conjures up illusions and fabricates it all to look anti-illusion. Made me more cynical in one hour than I usually get in years... Taught me a Third Wave-like lesson - how easily you can be lead onto a wrong path.
Whatever Burkhead may have felt about Hitler, Jews, and World War II, his research on the Third Wave was legitimate, and these editors show a disappointing lack of maturity. The first decided that Burkhead’s sources “might as well be all fabricated” simply because of his political views, but two of the students who sent Burkhead testimony wound up being in the Lesson Plan documentary a few years later: Joel Amkraut and Rick Schloss. He also got a message from a student who claimed to know Sherry Tousley. Given that none of those names were mentioned in any previous account of the Third Wave from Ron Jones, or in this 1991 article which mostly repeats Jones’s account uncritically, I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that all of Burkhead’s letters were legitimate, and thus we’re going to include them in our analysis.
There also was a documentary for German television made in 2019 called The Invisible Line: Die Geschichte Der Welle, but I will not be including it in my analysis simply because I haven’t seen it, as I haven’t been able to track it down. However, based on interviews I found with its director Emanuel Rotstein, the film seems to be mostly propagandistic rather than informative, and it features interviews with students who were uncritical of Jones in Lesson Plan; in the cast of interviewees listed on IMDB, there is only one name I don’t recognize. My sense is that Rotstein’s intention was to clean up the message of Lesson Plan, make it look more professional, and remove all dissenting perspectives.
Now, let’s try to figure out what actually happened. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so I’ll go through the story once more, step by step, providing important contextual details that shed light on what the experiment really looked like as it happened. I will also discuss some of Jones’s claims that are outright falsehoods, some that are probable but unconfirmed falsehoods, and some details that do confirm his original testimony.
First things first.
1. The Third Wave did not take place over five days.
Given how difficult it would be to forget such a thing after merely nine years, it’s safe to say that Jones’s claim that it took only five days is a lie. We can discern this from two sources. The first is from Sherry Tousley, who says,
I have in recent years seen various descriptions that say the Third Wave lasted four days [sic]. I totally disagree with this. My memory is the movement began on a Monday and went until the Thursday of the following week.
As she later explains, she’s confident about this because she vividly remembers using the weekend to create posters with the intent of protesting The Third Wave. Tousley’s claim is partly corroborated by an article in The Cubberley Catamount student newspaper written by Bill Klink, which claims that the Third Wave rally took place on Wednesday, April 5.
This article contains several pieces of information that seem fairly dubious, such as for example a quotation attributed to the student Joel Amkraut, the validity of which Amkraut later denied in a letter to Lyle Burkhead. However, given the precision of the date, as well as the timeliness of the article, I suspect that The Catamount is right and Tousley simply forgot the correct date, given that she wrote her recollection in 2012, 45 years after the event. The exercise thus probably took place over eight days, ten including the weekend, and not five.
Now, why would Ron Jones say that it took five days? What would be the point? I think the answer lies in the date of his essay. He wrote “Take as Directed” in 1976, five years after Philip Zimbardo conducted his Stanford Prison Experiment. That experiment was designed to show that people can break down and turn into authoritarian monsters in a mere week. Jones, himself a Stanford graduate, could not have failed to learn about that study, and so I’d guess that he decided to shorten the length of his week-and-a-half experiment down to five days, the length of a school week, just to mimic Zimbardo’s findings.
Also: note how the news story about The Third Wave is on page three of The Catamount. If it had really been such an important event, don’t you think it would have made the front page? Let’s continue.
2. The Third Wave activity was done with three class sections of students, not one.
In “Take as Directed,” Ron Jones presents his experiment as though it only occurred in one classroom with one group of thirty students. But according to the Catamount, he did the Third Wave activity with three different class sections: the second, third, and sixth periods of his sophomore Contemporary World class. We know that this is true because in Lesson Plan, we get confirmation that Ron Jones had the students create Third Wave membership cards for themselves, but not all the classes made them. Nancy West and Alyssa Hest both had theirs saved, but Russel Mulock tells us, “In our class, there weren’t cards,” while Joel Amkraut says, “If he did give out the cards, I don’t have mine, and I’ve never seen one.” That Jones did the Third Wave experiment with three class sections helps explain why students sometimes have contradictory accounts of what happened. It’s possible that Mulock and Amkraut were both in the same second period class when Jones hadn’t thought of the idea of membership cards, but then by the third period, Jones came up with it.
In the same documentary, Jones claims that he played “Wagnerian music” for the class on the first day, and Amkraut denies that there was any music. He even denies that there was a wave salute created on the second day, something the rest of the students all confirm. This may have been because of disparity in how Jones approached each class period. But if you’ll indulge me for a minute, Joel Amkraut’s testimony deserves some extended discussion. Of all the students, Amkraut is the most dismissive of Jones. At the end of the Lesson Plan documentary, he is the only one who claims in no uncertain terms that Ron Jones is dishonest:
We should be wary of being too gullible. If Ron Jones’s behavior after [the experiment] taught me anything, it’s how possible it is to manipulate the media, especially if someone’s got charisma, writes well, and has an axe to grind… and a profit motive.
On January 29, 2006, four years before the documentary was released, Joel’s brother David wrote a letter to Lyle Burkhead, and it’s worth quoting in its entirety:
Ron Jones has made a career of the Third Wave. I would not care if his version were given as fiction, or as fiction based on a bit of fact, but he is representing fiction as fact, and causing people all over the world to draw false, broad conclusions about human behavior. This is extremely irresponsible behavior with consequences that are impossible to calculate.
My understanding from people who were in his silly class is that everyone treated the Third Wave as a joke, and an excellent opportunity to avoid serious academic work. I suggest you methodically track down Cubberley High School students who actually participated and get the truth. Incidentally, some of the other stuff he has written about his experiences at Cubberley H.S. is also rubbish--- fiction portrayed as fact. For example, he has written about his coaching of a school basketball team there, and his descriptions are an unmitigated crock (my younger brother played on the team and I watched many of its games).
If you are interested, I can put you in touch with my brothers, one of whom participated in the Third Wave, and the other of whom was on the basketball team that Jones wrote about.
At the time I attended high school at Cubberley, Ron Jones was generally considered very cool. However, after attending high school, and becoming grown-ups, some of us came to different, or very mixed, conclusions.
Then, on February 1, Joel himself wrote a letter:
Joel Amkraut here, David Amkraut's brother.
Yes, I was in the '3rd Wave' class. I believe there were actually a number of classes involved.
I remember years ago I was at a talk about 'brainwashing' and the speaker lady commented in detail about what the 3rd Wave matter (she got her info from the movie and Jones' writings) "proved" about human nature and gullibility.
I have a fairly low tolerance of b.s., stood up, told her the movie was b.s., and she, an adult, shouldn't be so gullible as to believe whatever she read or viewed on a movie screen. She and the audience were annoyed and challenged me as being so all-knowing, but shut up fast when I said back that I knew it was b.s. BECAUSE I WAS IN JONES' CLASS (AND MY BROTHER WAS ON HIS BASKETBALL TEAM).
Joel, in a follow-up letter, also denies ever having said a certain quotation attributed to him in the Catamount (the same article by Bill Klink pictured above). It’s in reference to the big rally at the end, and it reads, “Everyone feels stupid about it. He sure made fools of us. I guess I expected a national leader.”
Now, given that Jones did the Third Wave simulation with three different class periods, it’s entirely possible that all of Amkraut’s denials are correct. And, let’s face it, high school student journalism is not exactly known for its accuracy (I myself have been misquoted twice by student journalists). However, it is also possible that he bought into Jones’s experiment as it was happening, expected a national youth movement leader to show up to the rally, and then felt tricked and later grew bitter about it, and that’s why he’s denying everything. It is hard to say for sure.
But one thing is certain: Jones’s essay, which people still consider an honest account, was dishonest in failing to disclose that three different class periods were involved.
3. Ron Jones had previously done similar immersive exercises beforehand, and the students probably all knew that this was a simulation of Nazi authoritarianism from the very beginning.
This is an important detail that Jones omits in his original account of what happened. If you read his version of events, you’d suspect that the students were utterly baffled by his authoritarian shift in behavior and yet eagerly adapted to it because of their latent fascistic instincts, or something like this. He even makes it seem as though the students didn’t even catch that “The Third Wave” was eerily similar to the other name for the Nazi regime, the Third Reich. But right from the get-go, the students knew that this was at least some kind of game. And given how much they liked Jones, it’s reasonable to assume they were expecting a pay-off, which probably encouraged them to play along with the experiment right from the very first day.
Jones himself admits his penchant for simulations and immersive exercises in an interview he conducted in 2011 with The Commentator, a student newspaper for Yeshiva University (brackets in original).
I had done simulation prior to this. For instance, to teach about apartheid, I didn’t allow the students to use the bathrooms. You might be living in South Africa and you’re black, and this might be what it’s like to feel like you’re not allowed to do certain things or go certain places. To teach about capitalism, I had students bring in food items to sell in a market and experience entrepreneurship. For socialism, I had students collect money and go out and buy things for lunch. To teach communism, I had every [student] give according to their ability and receive according to their needs, so it was just chaos. I had done these simulations and it worked. So when I entered into the wave, it was meant to be a one-day thing and I thought it would work.
In the Lesson Plan documentary, Russel Mulock tells us, “When he said he did simulations, I realized that’s a lot of what he lived for. He liked creating the experience of being there.” The experience of being there is something Jones created several times before the Third Wave experiment ever took place.
4. In The Third Wave experiment, Jones told his class that he was changing the structure of the grades, assigning them entirely based on class participation.
A detail that Ron Jones leaves out of his account is that he told the students that he was putting their grades on the line, assuring them that they would get an A so long as they participated in the Third Wave movement. According to former student Wendy Brody,
He said those who go along with the experiment will get an A, and those who don’t… and I seem to remember pretty clearly he didn’t fill in the blank, but it was sort of an implied threat, like something bad would happen.
And according to former student Mark Hancock,
He said that if we were active party members we would get an A, if we were passive party members we could get a C, if we tried a revolution and failed we would get an F, but if we succeeded we would get an A.
Towards the end of the Lesson Plan documentary, there’s a Third Wave reunion sequence where a bunch of former students talk about their experiences with the Third Wave in Room H-1 of what was once Cubberley High School, the exact room in which the “Third Wave rally” took place. One uncredited gentleman in a Hawaiian shirt says,
I thought it was fun. I thought it was an interesting social experiment. And I think most people sorta realize that it wasn’t real, and sometimes it seems like a lot of people in retrospect think it was a lot realer than I remember it being at the time. [The camera cuts to another shot, indicating a possible exchange that was edited out]. But I guess my other feeling on that was that it was scary how other people who didn’t believe in it still went along with it — that level of cynicism where they’d probably get an A, so they’d go along being a good Third Wave member.
A sympathetic reading of Jones’s experiment would say, “Wow, look at how so many of those students sacrificed their freedoms just to get a good grade… just wow…” But a closer look at what actually went on in the classrooms suggests that most of the students simply saw an opportunity for an easy A.
As the next bit of information will show, it seems like the students still had plenty of freedom even under this “authoritarian” classroom structure.
5. Much of the Third Wave experiment involved arts & crafts.
Although we can determine that the Third Wave experiment took a week and a half rather than merely a week, it is still pretty surprising just how many banners, posters, and signs the students all seem to have made during that time period. In “Take as Directed,” Jones makes a reference to the students designing a Third Wave banner, but there was definitely more than one of these.
Here are some screenshots from Lesson Plan’s IMDB page:
Given that those posters above all say “Strength Through Discipline,” we can surmise that they were made early on, probably the third day, though they might have taken more time. One can observe that some of them involve discrete letters assembled together in a collage, much like a stereotypical ransom note in a hostage situation. According to former student Philip Neel, “People would cut letters out of magazines and glue them onto pieces of paper, and then [Mr. Jones] put all these up on a wall in the classroom.” Another former student, Jo Ann Wood adds, “There were new flyers that you had to pass out,” so they also made flyers. Additionally, the Third Wave membership cards that Nancy West and Alyssa Hest had designed both indicate that the students put some time into them. Given how elaborate the posters and membership cards are, there’s no question that the students spent a considerable amount of their classes on them rather than learning anything substantive.
In his interview with The Commentator, Ron Jones discusses how each class came up with lesson plans, and what he says is quite surprising:
Did you make rules for the experiment, or did people make up their own?
I would write a lesson plan, sort of the rules of the day. But they were abstract. One of the students suggested a name for our group and a salute. So now we had a salute and a membership card and a sense of belonging and being. I marked several of those cards with a red X—you’re special in this community. “If you sense something going wrong, alien to our community or objecting to our community rules, let me know.” So kind of an early Gestapo was established.
So even though this was a sort of bottom-up creation, people interpreted it as all coming from you?
So, that was surprising. You’d think that I initiated a lot of this. But what happened was, I set up a situation where the students were empowered to some extent. As a teacher you always see the students sitting up front who are very bright. And you see the children in the back, the Bombers and the Normans. [But] sometimes you miss those in the middle…All of a sudden it was that middle group that was generating a lot of excitement and rules and behaviors and being a part of this.
Now, this lengthy passage merits some discussion, since it is such a brazen contradiction of his account in 1976 that I have a hard time believing that it’s any truer than what he first wrote. None of the students in the Lesson Plan documentary indicate that the other students came up with The Third Wave’s name and invented a salute for it. Pretty much all of them seem to agree that these things came from Jones, and I’ll assume that’s the case. If the students had come up with even the most basic elements of what was supposed to be Jones’s quasi-Nazi movement, then I have no idea how it could bear even the slightest trace of resemblance to totalitarian fascism. But whatever the case may be, his recollection presents an important insight into the nature of how the classes worked. The students largely came up with activities themselves and introduced the ideas to Jones.
I think it’s safe to conclude that Jones was not simulating an authoritarian environment. Instead, he created a class structure in which the students collectively decided what they’re going to do, and apparently they wanted to do a lot of arts & crafts.
I also think that this is enough writing for now. Stay tuned for five more key pieces of information about The Third Wave, followed by my own analysis of what really happened.