Original subtitles

MUSIC

When did you first hear about the Wave?

I first heard about the Wave I think it was about

one and a half years ago.

I heard about the Wave about two years ago.

I first heard about it in my civics class, my teacher used it

as an example for the class about social

and human behaviour.

Students were so easily coerced into doing something

that obviously wasn't right and that just took over

their lives during school.

In high school I mean in all school, in life, people

are going to want popularity so bad

that they're going to go to great lengths for it.

This feeling of a group is still here and you want

to belong to a group and if you don't belong

to any group you're kind of a freak

and no-one wants to be a freak, so.

One of the most basic human needs

is the need for social belonging.

And then to satisfy that need we will step across that line

between good and evil, between what we know is right

and usually do and what we know at some level is wrong

and we shouldn't do, but, but just this once

we're going to step across because the group

is pushing us in that direction.

The other thing about the human mind

is it has infinite power to justify any behaviour,

either before doing it to say here's why we have

to do it, then after you do it, it says

this is why we had to do it.

Human beings are more rationalising than rational.

That is we like to think we're rational, we weigh

the alternatives, but in fact what we are, are people who

can re-explain anything after the fact

to make it fit some good social values.

So it's the perversion of the incredible power

of the human mind, that can do almost anything,

all the magical things the human mind does

in terms of creativity can get perverted

to justify any evil, any transgression.

MUSIC

Mr Ron Jones please.

APPLAUSE

Cam you tell us something about the Third Wave,

the experiment that you did I mean when did you realise

that it's going out of control with the students at School?

For years I tried to hide from it, avoid it, not discuss it.

It's a responsibility to really try to understand

what is good and what is evil.

I thought it would be a one day exercise

and it turned out to be a one week existence

in terror actually.

My ego was inflated and my sense of power and control

was elevated and I liked it that's the problem.

But I'm at least aware of that.

I was liking it, the adulation, the power, the control.

By the fourth day my wife was saying to me

“you have to stop this it is very dangerous”.

What Ron Jones as far as I understood was trying to do

is have American students of the 60's appreciate

the ease with which similar students in Germany

became part of Hitler's youth.

Students were giving away their friendships

for the thought of being better than their neighbours

or being a part of this thing.

It was scary and frightening and I just knew

it had to come to an end.

It was learning about history in the first person.

You had extra points for coming up with information

about other people.

Just to learn something about human nature,

about myself and about other people

and to learn that it can happen here.

I stumbled upon a bit of human nature and psyche.

Why do we give up our freedom for the thought

of being better than everyone else?

And it's a lesson that we all need to see

and hear and talk about.

I've seen websites where they want to take the students

and test them all and see if they're normal

and I've seen websites that think we were all a bunch...

The websites where they bought the fictional version

think we were all really truly nasty kids which we were not.

And I don't really want to give those people

anything to work with.

I like a little bit of privacy.

I think it's an important story, I think it was

a fascinating experience and it's been a long time

since I've been able to talk about it

with any of my friends who were in the class.

MUSIC

Last time I was at Cubberley was

probably 25 years ago, maybe 30.

I've been sharing this story with people for almost 40 years.

MUSIC

Palo Alto in 1967 was already a hi-tech centre,

already a very professional, middle class, upper middle class

community and you could almost call it Leave it to Beaver

or the Nelsons they were mostly intact families,

mostly white middle class, probably a mix of Catholic,

Protestant and Jewish.

People moved to Palo Alto during this time

to have their kids come to school and to be

in the Palo Alto school system.

We grew up and took it for granted; We had the best

schooling I think probably in the country.

The students were extraordinarily socially aware;

there was an aliveness and activity orientation

to be involved with society and contemporary issues

that I had not encountered prior to coming to live in Palo Alto.

I was pretty oblivious at that time, I was not really

connected to my friends, I mean I was new

in the school and I was two years younger

than everyone else.

Our school was still split, we had the Jocks

and we had the Car Club, just like out of the 50's.

The hippies were just beginning to come on line,

more in the seniors than the sophomores.

We had Vietnam going on and a lot of the kids

were being real active out there.

I remember when JFK came to town there was

a motorcade and it went by our school so there was

a lot of very patriotic feeling but then the Vietnam war

was happening so you know you were trying

to balance both of those.

Again this all changed in a matter of months,

weeks and months after the Wave, but at the time

of the Wave we were mostly clean cut, well-behaved

15 year old kids with a charismatic teacher

that we trusted and loved.

When I first met Ron Jones I thought God he is so young.

He's like one of us.

I hired Ron Jones, he was exactly the teacher

I needed for a slot because he was a, he had

a MA from Stanford, he had good academic credentials

and at Palo Alto that was important.

Cubberley was a great school because it was closer

to east side and it had an eclectic kind of population

and it had a tradition for being a very innovative

school so I, I felt very fortunate to be there.

Ron would come to work in just a white shirt

and often times without a tie and roll up his sleeves.

He did innovative things too; He was bringing guests

to the class. Very interesting controversial guests,

he brought in a communist, he brought in a clansman,

he brought in a member of the American Nazi party

to talk about white supremacy.

All the way through he was presenting different sides

of every question, I remember when we studied

about Vietnam he made us write 10 arguments for it,

10 arguments against.

He didn't try to be above you, he tried to, I would say

that Ron had a, Jones had a capacity to teach with you.

When he said he did simulations I realised that's a lot

of what he lived for.

He like creating the experience of being there.

You know I felt like he was trying

to look at the whole picture always.

And trying to get us to look at the whole picture always

with a lot of heart and a lot of passion.

It was always exciting, one day you'd go and the desks

were in a row and then the next day you'd come in

they'd be all spread all over the room.

He had what I called stage presence; I didn't know

at the time that he was an actor and a fiction writer.

But he commanded the front of the classroom

like a skilled actor.

MUSIC

In the 60's lots of people were experimenting with

experiential teaching, that is instead of didactic teaching

where a teacher comes in and says “let me tell you what

I know”, it's creating, setting situations in which

the students would participate.

I felt if students could feel something and work

with it that would be better than simply reading

about it so I tried to develop simulations.

One of the, I remember one of the projects

he wanted to do was to analyse the garbage that came out

of Cubberley High School, because he felt

that was a statement about the nature of society.

He was the original Greenpeace activist;

I mean he really was before his time.

In March 1967 here at Cubberley High School

in the 10th grade at about aged 15 we were taking

a contemporary world history class from our teacher Mr Jones.

The topic in March was the World Before World War II

and in particular Germany at the time.

Often we never really knew where Ron Jones was going

to take us when he went down some of his paths for education.

MUSIC

My memory of the Third Wave was that we were asking.

Mr Jones as we were finishing up one unit of study

“what are we going to study the next day?”

Because we were so fascinated by his teaching,

by his lectures, we couldn't wait to hear what was next.

How unusual was that? But that's how excellent

and dynamic his teaching was.

I think he approached it from the standpoint of

we're going to do things a little bit differently,

we're going to do a little bit of perhaps role playing

and so it was very unthreatening.

We came into class and the chairs were suddenly

arranged in a row or arranged in five or six rows.

And I know what's happening I mean they're saying

to themselves okay we'll get Mr Jones on one of his

tirades and it will be a fun day, they will be no tests,

no pop quizzes.

I remember clearly from him and classmates

that if we followed what was asked of us we'd all get A's.

You needed good grades to get into college and you actually

needed specific classes and so you needed to pass this class.

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 a, it implied threat you know

like something bad would happen.

The other thing would have been to go to the library

which was I thought you got diseases there you know,

so I never went to the library.

But I stayed in the class and did what

I had to do for a grade.

It was that simple.

He said that if we were active party members we would get an A.

If we were passive party members we would get a C.

If we tried a revolution and failed we would get an F

but if our revolution succeeded we would get an A.

The first two days of the experiment Mr Jones

was not the usual Ron Jones.

It's funny he didn't quite have the smile in his expression,

he didn't quite have the smile in his eyes either.

This was totally out of character for him,

we had known him for six months, half a year,

and he was always smiling, he was charismatic

and a lot of fun to be around.

So when he came in and was not smiling it was very unnerving.

He usually was a lot more open sometimes

we'd go outside to study certain things, sometimes we

would do round table discussions.

With this he came in with a very structured idea.

So I cleaned the room, put the desks in order,

I took down all the projects, played some Wagnering music,

darkened the room and introduced the students to discipline.

Well I like classical music and I don't remember any Wagner

or German music being played.

He wrote on the board the idea the concept of strength

through discipline, how it's through discipline and practice

that athletes were able to perform all the things they did.

He did have us sit at attention at the seats

as opposed to just sprawling all over

as is the usual thing you do in high school.

He talked about how when you sat straight and sat at

attention you could breathe easier, when you breathe easier

you could concentrate better and your answers are more concise.

The moment he said that the entire class shifted

their posture and here they all were sitting bolt upright

with their feet on the floor and their arms to their sides.

That was actually pretty comfortable for me

because I play the harp and you have to, you know

it was like okay this is, you know there's certain things

about your body energy when you sit up straight

and this is all fine with me.

One of the first things that he did for us was give us

an exercise where we put our hands behind our back

and lock them together.

We're going to you know look forward, straight ahead

and everybody thought okay this is kind of fun you know,

I can play along with this.

That was easy for me to sign on to you know,

there is a certain strength that comes from discipline.

The question is to what end?

Then he wanted to see how quickly we could be

disassembled outside and then race into the room

and sit still like this which he was calling

sitting at attention.

It was chaotic like you know first time the students

went outside the room and came back in they could

come back any way they wish so there's the tumbling

and falling and bouncing into people, desks falling over.

And so we tried this over and over again,

again it's just as a joke, as a game but indeed it worked.

He timed us coming back into the chairs and we all sat down

and everybody's bumping into each other and sitting down

and sitting at attention like this and looking and then.

Mr Jones would look at the stop watch and say.

“I think we could do it faster”.

And then the second episode was to come into the room

but try to be disciplined, try to move smoothly,

try to move cleanly, try to get to your seat

and sit down promptly and there's shum boom,

everyone's sitting down.

Each time we came in we did it a little bit faster

and Mr Jones was ready to move on he said

“okay I think we've done it” and one of the students

yelled out “Mr Jones I think we can go quicker”.

And so we all got up and we did it again

and that was a little, just that little moment, was a little bit

of a sign that maybe the kids were really getting into it,

maybe we were getting into it pretty strongly,

a little too fast.

Now up to this point, one Jones had allowed us to call him

as Ron or Mr Jones, however we wished,

but he was open to Ron.

From this point on we were just to refer to him as Mr Jones.

Well I entered the class the second day

and I really anticipated that the class would be back

to normal, they'd be this hubbub of excitement and we

would discuss the first day, but to my surprise the class

was kind of sitting there and they had these like zipper

like smiles on their faces and these

little twinkle in their eyes.

So when we all gathered in the class on the beginning

of the second day which was even before Ron Jones

came in we did all go to our places,

we did all stand by our seats and we were all quiet.

And myself was thinking about okay

there is this curiosity why are they sitting like that?

And maybe we should continue and if we do continue

where do we go, what do we do,

what was that about yesterday?

Ron was making it up day by day as he went along,

it wasn't like a lesson plan that he had.

So spontaneously I went to the blackboard

and strength through discipline had already been there

and I wrote down strength through

community. And that's when he was talking

about La Rossa, the people who build houses

together versus the individual.

La Rossa, a movement, a cause, building a barn together,

doing something together as a community,

the idea of a community being more important

than the individual. And then I gave the students

of feeling of being a part of the group

by whispering together, or chanting together,

or just stomping feet together, just this raw,

guttural feeling of being a part of something

bigger than oneself.

They had the SLA going on you had the Black Panthers,

you had a lot of things like this going on and when you're

a member of that you had the camaraderie and you feel like

you're a little piece of a larger community of power.

The idea of perhaps if we all shared a grade

as opposed to an individual grade

and how good it would feel to go home with an A

as opposed to a C plus and I think that really

affected some kids. You know.

God damn it I've been getting a C plus all my life

and I'm going to go home with an A to my parents,

I'm in this.

So we would get together outside of class

and do homework together and turn it in as a group.

I thought that was great because I didn't have to study

we basically got to do certain things

and it seemed like a lot of fun.

I remember thinking that gosh I wonder

how that's going to work.

Obviously this was not as popular

with the really good students because they could,

to some degree could see their grades being compromised.

Grades, there was no threat, there was no threat

involved with us sharing, if anything it again got people to,

who had not participated much in the class before

to talk and be part of the class.

The fact that students were beginning to assist each other

and come up with answers for a high school teacher

all of a sudden I'm being flooded with accuracy

of answers and a community

that's generating these answers.

It's not one student failing or one student being successful.

Suddenly there is this community of answers.

He also in his first couple of days came up

with the concept of he would ask us a question,

first of all we would have to say Mr Jones to start,

and that our answers to these questions

would have to be three words or less.

Very, very brief, cryptic, short, sharp.

If you have something to say you get up

next to your desk and address him properly.

You know good manners, nothing wrong with that.

What if we had a community where, well of course,

we'll need some kind of signature

so I created a Wave salute?

And the salute was like this.

It was pretty much just like.

And we had to do this right when we saw each other or something?

Well there was a Hitler salute I remember that.

Now that you're bringing this all back

it's like it's automatic.

I'm sorry I don't remember the hand signal.

The salute was a curved hand representing a wave

and our organisation was called The.

Third Wave. In beach law that means The Third Wave

is is the strongest, the most powerful.

And so with strength through discipline

we were The Third Wave.

He gave us our Third Wave ID cards.

And this was again I just reached in my drawer

and there was a bunch of index cards.

So I pulled them out and passed them out to each student.

And he said “all these cards are going to be blank

except for three of them which will have a red X on them”.

With the idea that if you get a red X on your card

you're a little special.

You three are going to be the informants.

In our class there weren't cards.

But Ron came around each table and just said

whether we were informers or not.

What I remember was that he actually used the word Gestapo.

You're to report to me anyone who doesn't go along

with our community values.

Which was the salute, if you saw another community member.

We were to salute each other as we passed in the halls;

we were also to salute each other

when we passed each other off campus.

If he did give out the cards I don't have mine

and I've never seen one and apparently

none of them have survived.

This is a strength through discipline membership card

and this was the one that I put together for the class.

And this was the one I made;

I was very into psychedelic colours at the time.

You know I used to paint myself with all kinds

of psychedelic colours, so I made a very

psychedelic kind of card.

Another rule was to not gather in groups larger than two,

both in class and out of class and off campus, even at home.

I don't think we were to talk too much other than

if you have a trusted friend maybe bring them in.

It struck me as very dangerous for a movement

to emerge in which people were not free to express

what they thought, what they felt, they weren't in a sense

it seemed free to even have their own beliefs.

So anyway he passed out all these cards

and three people got the red X's.

However as Mr Jones disclosed later

more than three people were turning in names.

I'm a big question asker and lo and behold

that is precisely what I did I think I stood up by my desk

and said Mr Jones “why can't we just say what we think,

why can't we just express our opinions

about what we think about The Third Wave?”

And at that point he said “You to the library

for the rest of the semester”.

Things that they did, I do remember that happened

in my class, somebody indeed was sent to the library,

that people were, and more than one time people

were banished from the class.

You were there 100 per cent or you were not.

And so if you even had a doubt about something

he was saying and you mentioned that

he would send you out.

People would just disappear, and that no one

was able to talk about it made it even more mysterious.

And that's not like you saw them after class

or after school and saying “hey what's this all about?”

So I went off to the library feeling most dejected

and outcast and really very intimidated

I think I felt like crying.

Naively I had believed him that he had in fact

told all the faculty that he would collect our names

and kick us out so I was fearful to tell the librarian

why I was there but she was really on me,

she wanted to know what are you doing here

you need to be in class.

So I remember just taking a really deep breath and thinking

well I'm going to tell her and okay maybe

she turns my name in and I'm already out,

I already have the F so what else can they do?

But it still was very intimidating to me,

very much so to tell her.

But I did begin describing to her the nature of the movement

as I had come to understand it in those first few days

and her response was one of great alarm,

she shared with me that she had been born and raised

in Nazi Germany and that this was

the climate of her upbringing.

And she said this is so like that and you can't take this

sitting down, you have to do something and I knew

that I did have to do something but I just hadn't been able

to figure out what on earth that would be

and part of my dilemma in trying to figure it out was trying

to think of what I could do that would have

any impact that I could do in secret?

That evening I went home and told my parents about this

and I have to give them credit because they said

“well what would you like to do?”

And the thing that came to my mind immediately

was to make posters.

About 8.30 in the evening my father would drive me

over to the high school campus.

This was a very warm climate in Palo Alto so all of the

hallways were outdoors and I could just go

and put up posters and so that first night I just felt like

oh at least I'm doing something.

When I arrived at school the next morning

between first and second hours I thought I'm just going

to take a quick spin around the school and just admire

my handiwork and just see my posters.

Much to my astonishment there was not a single poster up.

So I saw that within an hour of school starting someone

had been in charge of sweeping the school,

to make sure there was nothing negative about.

The Third Wave anywhere and they had torn down every poster.

I don't remember ever asking a student

to take down posters per say.

The next night I went home after school and repeated

my poster making obsession behaviour and took a ladder

to the school the next day and each evening

that became the practice

to lug a ladder to the school.

So I would get the posters up just as high as I could

and even then many of the posters still came down.

I guess people would jump up and grab them but there were

some that stayed up which was my secret

and sort of silent triumph.

This organisation was called The Breakers

who were trying to stop The Third Wave.

Actually I used to live in Rhode Island where there was

a mansion called The Breakers when I was a child

the breakers are waves and then there's the pun

of breaking the movement.

It was a mystery to me as to The Breakers,

who they were or what they were?

It was one more mystery in that whole event.

Something that happened also that was unexpected

was a tremendous upheaval of ideas about what to do

that I hadn't thought about.

Whether it be making something for the class

or doing something for the class, I had not perceived that.

But I allowed that to happen.

On the third day of the experiment Mr Jones

came in and he wrote strength through

action. I believe, that was the third day

that was his lesson of the day.

Everything that he had been talking to us about,

the first two days with strength through discipline

and strength through community really mean nothing

unless there's action to go along with it.

We started making posters; especially because I was

interested in art that was one thing I said.

“I can help out with that part of the experiment”.

People would cut letters out of magazines

and glue them on to pieces of paper and then he'd

put all these up on a wall in the classroom.

There were new flyers that you had to pass out.

He really just wanted us out there talking about it.

There were tables set up in the corridors where members

of The Third Wave from Mr Jones' class,

would try to enlist other students.

My name is Rick Schloss, I was a senior

at Cubberley High School in 1967, it was between classes

and I'm walking down this hallway and at this point

I encounter a table like this where there were

two guys standing behind it.

There is a banner on the wall and the banner says.

The Third Wave.

Underneath The Third Wave it said Strength through Unity.

At this point one of the guys comes around the table

and asks me if I'd like to join The Third Wave?

Never heard of it before, don't have a clue what it's about

and when I ask him what what it was he said

“strength through unity”, that's all he could tell me.

I asked them again so what do you stand for?

The other guy chimes in “strength through unity”,

they constantly repeated this mantra without really

telling me what this was about.

At this point I decided no I'm not interested,

I'm going to walk away and as I start to take a step away

one of the guys walks around the corner, produces a small

spiral wound binder and a pencil and what he's

going to do is he wants my name.

I refused to give him my name, the other guy started

to move over like it was actually

going to be confrontational.

At that time I was getting ready to go to battle,

it looked like maybe it was going to be a fist fight

right here in the hallway.

I even saw fist fights about The Third Wave in the hallways

as people became more and more impassioned.

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 was, it had a lot of energy

and a lot of excitement and a lot of purpose.

So when I heard that other students were, you know

were fighting Third Wave members that 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.

I was on the outside, I wasn't part of this class

and I desperately wanted to be part of it and when I did

everything I could do to try to find out how to be part of it

I was excluded.

And the people that were in the classes in there

wouldn't give me the time of day, wouldn't tell me

what's going on and I'm going “well this is terrible,

I'm not part of this picture”.

About midway through this Third Wave experience

I decided I would walk past the classroom at fifth hour

just to see what was going on in the room.

But I really was very fearful in doing it because

I thought maybe someone would see me and point me out.

I didn't know if people were starting to suspect that I had

anything to do with any of the subversive activities.

So I just walked by very cautiously and only looked out

of the very corner of my eye and to my shock what I noticed

was just standing room only in that class.

The room was absolutely packed.

Everyone that couldn't find a seat pulled up a piece of floor,

it was amazing and there were always people waiting

to get in, you know out at the door.

All of a sudden we started to get attention from juniors

and seniors and people outside of our classroom wanting

to know what was going on, what was happening,

what was The Third Wave about?

Students from all the different levels within

the high school were there, and there was just this

emergence of passion in the room.

People were just so excited, so electrified to be involved

with this new movement and it both amazed and terrified me.

I had heard about it while it was going on I had enough

friends at Cubberley that I heard that this was happening.

I became frightened when I realised that there were

students coming into the classroom from outside

the original class and I also knew that there were students

from the other two high schools in the district

that were thinking about joining The Wave.

I was privy to that kind of gossip, those red X's

that I'd given everybody became this funnel of information.

I knew everything that was happening; It was scary to know

minute details about what someone was telling

their parents or what someone was telling their best friend.

It's not enough to think a certain way;

we have to act in a certain way.

We have to be strong, we have to get rid of the weak people

in the class, we have to get rid of the potential informers,

the spies.

Yes we were part of a group but now we had finks out there.

I think there was an innate feeling of wanting

to be accepted by your peers, you wanted to be

you know good, you wanted to fit in and I,

I wanted people to like me, I think I would have been

capable of many things that I would hate to admit.

The scarder they were of being caught themselves

or being hurt the more they gave up information on people.

Things like that were going on and it was a

complete small little society of this going on

and it was dog eat dog for your grade.

That's when you start finding out who are the

good people, the bad people and a true person

was actually the worst. There were people that were living

and dying it that it run their life and they were,

doing everything exactly what Ron wanted them to do.

You shied away from people that were scoffing at it

because you wanted to remain part of the group.

You never knew who might turn somebody in and when

there were these mock trials you never know if somebody

had actually turned the person in or if it was just made up.

In this classroom with Mr Jones at the head of the classroom

and us sitting in our rows, he would come into

the class and tell us that he had heard from a secret police

and there had been violators that had to be tried that day.

So he'd stand up in front of the class and he would say

so and so and they would snap to attention at their desk

and stand up next to their desk.

You have been seen in the company

of known revolutionaries

what do you have to say about that?

And all of a sudden the class would start chanting,

in unison, guilty, guilty, guilty.

Jones would go over to his desk, grab one of his ditto forms,

that says you are hereby exiled to the library

for the duration of the experiment, whenever this class

meets hereafter on a daily basis you are to go

to the library; You are never to come back to class.

And that student would be escorted out the door

and they'd be gone.

During one of the weeks, I think it was the second week;

I had passed one of my classmates in the hall,

who was in The Third Wave and she had given me

the Third Wave salute which I did not return,

not being part of the movement.

And I could see her face just turn just this look of shock

and she said to me “Sherry you didn't return the salute”.

So I just told her “well I'm not in the movement”,

and she said with a tone of disbelief “You're not, what?”

And I reiterated it and from that moment on she wanted

to have absolutely nothing to do with me, any time

we passed in the hall she would look the other way,

no acknowledgement of my existence and we had been,

at least casual friends, we chatted, we would always

say hi when we saw each other previously.

But once she saw that I was not in the movement

she wanted just absolutely nothing to do with me.

Outside of class I believe it was after the second

or third day I was with one of my best friends and in that day

you know we were saying strength through discipline STD,

the you know those were the initials, the acronym.

There was a commercial out in that day I think it was for Tide

or for Ajax, I can't remember which one but their slogan

was “Stronger Than Dirt”.

So I told my best friend I said “you know STD means

stronger than dirt” and he just laughed and all that,

I was just making a joke about The Third Wave.

And we went about our ways and everything,

the very next morning Mr Jones has me stand up

at attention and says “Mr Neel I want you to stand up

next to your desk”.

And he pulls out a piece of paper out of his pocket

and he says “it's been said to me that you said STD

means stronger than dirt”.

And I look at my friend who's sat in front of me

and he's just staring straight ahead, no smile or anything.

And I realised you know obviously he had turned me in.

And then there was also the phenomenon

of some students getting psychologically involved in it.

Well beyond a game.

One of the students sat over here, the very corner

of the room, right by the door.

And I remember he'd always sit there even during lunch hour.

No student should ever be alone, and this kid was just alone

and one day he followed me into the faculty room

where he was addressed by the English teacher, Mr Tanner.

Mr Tanner said “you don't belong in here, you're a student”.

And this child turned to that teacher and said.

“I'm not a student, I'm a bodyguard”.

All of a sudden there was a line crossed all over the place

and this wasn't about teaching students or running

a simulation, this was like, this was out of bounds.

He would have bodyguards around him so of course

whenever we saw Ron Jones walking in the hallways

he would be getting salutes, he would be saluting,

his body guards would be saluting and we would be

saluting back so, this group, this master and his group

would be walking through the hallways and creating

this wave of of salutes as he went through.

The Tech prep class that I was teaching at the same time

did basically kidnap me, take me to a dumpster,

drop me in a dumpster and say “we're not letting you out

until you let us be the Gestapo” basically.

So this is that kind of mixture of of things happening.

Some students just wanted to go along, some students

joining because it might be fun and some students

taking it on as “this is my salvation”.

It all went back to the way that many children were raised

in that time period where you know they didn't get a lot of

one on one personal time with their parents,

there was no such thing as “how are you feeling?”

And nobody cared how you were feeling, you just got

the best grades you could and you went on to college

and that would please your parents.

At that point we knew we had slogans, rules, a sense

of direction and we had a secret police to make sure

we followed the rules.

I have a memory of the room being ransacked

I think on the fourth day.

Weird things were starting to happen around the school.

His room was vandalised.

I didn't do anything to vandalise the classroom

but I put posters up all over the room, I think I taped

posters on every desk top and I wrote on the board.

By ransacked I mean that somebody just comes through

and just kind of torn down banners and...

But that was happening a lot, banners being torn down,

banners being put back.

Literally the only topic I heard students speak about

the entire day was “did you hear someone broke into.

The Third Wave headquarters?”

I'd be walking down the hall and hear people at their lockers,

people I had no idea who they even were talking about this.

Really my fear was all the greater because I just felt like

if someone finds out that I did it then

the danger is greater.

All of a sudden from the very beginning of the fourth day

things were different.

Mr Jones came into the classroom and closed the curtains

and shut the door and locked it.

He had a full time bodyguard that was with him.

By now there were members of the Car Club who were acting

as self-appointed bodyguards and one of them stood by

the door when it was locked.

He turned out the lights, drew the curtains

and it was pretty dark in there.

We were kept standing.

At this point he I believe expelled a couple of people

on the concept of performing mock assassinations.

I believe they were taken out of the class at that time

and then he changed the whole process on us.

There was a little bit of a slant, a different change

in his mood and how he was addressing us.

And you have to remember the class is jam packed

by now you know the individual classroom, Mr Jones,

Room C3 was just lined with people sitting in the aisles

or standing by the windows, by the bench seats.

He told us that this was not a game, this was not

something that just our class was in, but that teachers

all over the nation were doing this in classes

and that we were going to get together and form

a third political party in this country.

The trials were held to get the kids out who weren't really

serious about it and those of you who are left

are the strong ones who will take this student movement

forward, it is in fact a national movement, there's 1025

other schools doing this right now and in those days

there was no internet so there was no way to fact check him

and oddly enough nobody asked him to prove it either.

We trusted him, or at least we weren't in a position

to make waves.

This was happening in San Francisco; He said this is

happening in Chicago, this is happening in Philadelphia,

this is happening in New York.

And because it was working so well they were going

to come out with their party leader the next day.

That changed the simulation, that changed it to being

the stakes were raised and all of sudden it's bigger than me

and it wasn't something that I could pull out of

and have it stop.

The group had come together because of their

disenchantment with our country after President Kennedy's death.

Now all the hopes that he had and we had as a nation

through the peace corps and development and civil rights

and they're saying there's now a new party being formed

to take a lot of those values and bring them

forward again because they've been lost.

And of course for us they had been lost because there was

the Vietnam war going on and there were still

civil right problems and there were still leaders being

assassinated and killed left and right in our country.

I remember inside of myself thinking I trusted

the Government that they were telling us the truth

and it was my first experience with political situations

where we weren't fully informed and we didn't know

necessarily everything that was going on and I recall

feeling betrayed a little bit by our Government.

Up until that point it, I was raised to believe everything

that the Government said as the truth.

Our country was having economic problems that

we could do better economically, that we could do

better politically, militarily.

That there was a lot of weakness going on

with our current administration, we were in a war

that nobody wanted to be in.

That we were going to find a better way, that we were going

to get rid of those people in Washington who are not

following what the mass of people wanted to follow.

And oddly enough there was a Time magazine,

or some magazine, that happened to have this thing

called The Third Wave.

One of my fellow classmates from the back said.

“Mr Jones what about this?”

And it was a colour ad and it said.

The Third Wave is coming.

And I reached over and grabbed it and I said.

“And this is the signal of action and tomorrow we're going

to have a rally and you're going to meet

a presidential candidate that's going to explain the purpose

of The Wave and this is our new leader and we're going

to rise up together and change the world”.

Well that was my magazine, I brought that in,

it was a double page, there's some pictures in the bottom

and there's something about Third Wave

and it kind of crossed the scene boundary in the middle.

That kind of helped decide me into the state of thinking

this indeed is going to happen.

When he told us this was a real thing,

a real youth movement, I don't remember any more

about this youth movement what it was supposed to be,

but the fact that it was supposedly real.

If this was how it was being run I didn't want any part of it

and I didn't, I remember at that time feeling very frightened

and very helpless and like what could we do?

Was there anything that could be done?

And I remember talking to Mark a great deal about

you know we're sort of comparing notes about

what was going on and was there something we could do?

And I didn't know, I felt really, wow this was, this was,

this was bigger stuff than I knew how to handle.

I kept looking at Ron Jones and I kept trying to find some,

something, something in his attitude or demeanour

or a twinkle in the corner of his eye or something

in the way he spoke that would let me know

that this guy is pulling our leg.

I believed it was possible because there were

a lot of other things happening during the 60's

of movements that had gone nationwide.

He said that he wanted all of us to report the next day

at noon to Room H1, which was a big assembly hall,

and on close circuit TV.

The national party leader would come out on a limb

and cut it off and announce the new student movement.

Mr Jones then abruptly left the room, left us all alone

in the dark, I remember one student jumping up,

it was a girl I think, and she was telling everybody

to not go, that this was wrong.

And I don't think anybody joined her and I kind of looked

around out of the corner of my eye and I saw that

everybody else was just ignoring her and staring

straight ahead which had a lot you know forced me

you know to sort of keep going along with everybody

and not you know disband at this point.

When we left that class that day I and friends of mine

were flabbergasted, my world had changed.

He was such a beloved charismatic teacher

to have him say that this was a real thing.

I was, I don't think I've ever felt so betrayed in my life.

When Ron Jones told us this was going to happen he gave us

a couple of conditions and the conditions were that we were

not to talk about this upcoming assembly or that.

The Third Wave was a real political group,

we were not to talk about that with anyone.

My mum's concern was mainly that somebody that was

in authority was talking to the students and that some

of the students were really getting into what he was saying

and that this could cause upheaval in our democracy

and she felt that it was just the beginning of something

bigger that she had seen happen with Hitler and so forth.

One of the rumours was that a kid had gone

to their counsellor and complained about it

and the counsellor had turned them into Jones

and they'd been exiled.

We never knew who the student was but the rumour was

very effective at keeping us at bay.

I didn't let anybody know that I had gone to the counsellor

to speak with my mother because I didn't know who had

that connection with Ron and they might say

“oh she knows and so make sure she doesn't go to the assembly”.

We usually talked about all kinds of things, politics,

school, whatever and we'd sit down to dinner every night

and they noticed this particular night that I was not very

talkative and that I seemed to have something on my mind,

so they asked me.

And I told them I said “maybe, maybe you don't

want to go to work tomorrow”.

I said “I think it would be a good idea if you didn't,

but if you do have to go to work see if you can be by

a television set at 12 noon because I think something

really major is is going to be happening”.

Well the principal was pretty excited and elated by the way

because it took all the discontents off the street

for a second, out of the corridor, if they were ending up

in my classroom so there, there seemed to be a calm

about the school and an order that he really appreciated.

Ron Jones didn't keep me updated day-to-day

as the experiment went along and I didn't expect him to.

I had approved his approach and I assumed that he would

carry it through in a professional manner.

And as I say I did get one or two calls from parents

in which I explained the purpose of the lesson

and that I thought it would be an excellent way

to teach the students the dangers of totalitarianism.

That afternoon when I was walking in the corridors

I saw a lot of the students, the senior students who were

the long haired radical protesters who had cut classes

to come into The Third Wave, I heard them in the hallway saying

“we're going to get the pigs out of Washington;

we're going to get us out of Vietnam”.

And you know even though we were sophomores

we were two years away from the draft.

Vietnam was a draft war, it wasn't like the Iraqi war

and in a couple of years the Government was going

to hand us a gun and say “either kill or be killed”.

And so when I heard these guys saying you know

“we're going to get the people out of Washington

who are responsible for this war”, that motivated me

to want to go to the rally the next day.

If we were chosen we don't want to screw this up

for everybody else that you know is going to be participating.

And that was part of it to as it went on,

you didn't want to fail because there were all these

other people counting on you.

You didn't want to be the reason why it didn't, progress.

And then we came in that morning to the class and there was

no teacher there and we were all just sort of wondering

what was going to happen.

And then I believe it was two guys, it was at least two,

from the executor Car Club who were sort of his

bodyguards came in to escort us to the room

where we were going to be watching this video.

And I hadn't really planned it or anything but I stood up

and told everyone not to go that it wasn't right.

It wasn't like should I or shouldn't I?

When the time came she knew she wasn't going to go

and she was going to take whatever happened.

And they wrote my name down and I remember feeling

oh my God you know what have I done?

She was never wishy-washy, she was hurt, she was angry,

she was confused, you know here was this teacher,

I mean after all her father was a teacher you know

and she grew up in an academic setting and the idea

that a teacher would involve the students this way

was very, everything kind of broke down, it was really bad.

Only one other girl didn't go, Jeannie, sat, was sitting right

in front of me and everyone else left and I was sort of

I couldn't believe that everyone was going to

really watch this rally.

And I was very disappointed in myself and then I was,

I remember my heart was pounding and I remember feeling

Jeannie and I sitting looking at each other

and like what do we do now?

And yet she turned to me and I remember her

how she looked and she was just so glad, I think she was

really glad that someone had said something.

Because I don't think, she didn't want to go

and maybe she couldn't have done it if it was just herself.

It was so exciting you didn't want to be left out

either you wanted to see what was going on.

I thought indeed it was going to happen.

I mean I believed I trusted, believed Ron Jones

was telling the truth.

And I didn't feel comfortable, I really didn't

and something big was going to happen.

When it was time to go to H1 I still wasn't sure

if I was going to go through with this.

So I came into H1 and there were already people there.

I looked inside and by now it felt like 200 students

were in there.

My assumption is maybe 200 it might have been less,

all I know it was filled up.

Word had spread, there were photographers

taking pictures of everybody in the room.

Taking pictures of him and the bodyguards

and looking out on the class.

And I remember my vantage point of being able

to look down over everything and Ron

was down in the middle.

The lights were off, the room was quiet.

There were bodyguards at the doors and because I saw

everybody else there and that it had grown

I decided to go in.

And I sat down and there was just like nothing happening.

You know in retrospect I'd always felt like you know

I could leave at any time anyway so.

So I went into the classroom, Room H1, and I remember.

Mr Jones was in front of the class and everybody

was sitting at ease I think.

Which meant you know we had our hands

behind our back and held together.

At that point he said “let us show everybody

the extent of our training”.

So he had us all stand up at attention and we all

belted out in unison strength through discipline,

strength through community, strength through action

and it started soft and then it grew louder and louder

and louder so that everybody was in this huge unison

of yelling out this mantra.

And photographers were snapping pictures and these were

photographers I'd never seen I'd just assumed

they were from magazines and newspapers

from all over the peninsula.

And then Mr Jones had us sit at attention to wait for

the party leader and in the front of the room

was a television set, you know probably a 19 inch screen,

and he said the party leader's going to come on

any minute now and he left the room with it on

it was just snow.

His bodyguards went out of the room, the reporters

went out of the room and there were all of these people

looking at snow on a TV screen.

And it was 12 o'clock.

And you're looking around and suddenly Jones isn't there

and you're beginning to freak out, no guards, no Jones,

static on the tube.

I looked around and all I could see were grey faces

and everybody zombie like staring at the screen

waiting for something to happen.

And it's like a pressure cooker and you just we all felt

like something was really wrong, there was, the TV

wasn't working, the teacher wasn't here,

the guards were gone and all basically the students

were sitting in here alone.

Everybody looked like they were dead.

I just, and my mind flipped, my mind flipped to like the Jews

in the concentration camp.

Being told they're going to a room to take a shower.

The doors shutting and then the pellets being dropped

from the pipes up above, I thought we were trapped.

I went into a panic. I stood up and I said.

“I'm getting the hell out of here”.

We basically panicked in my case it was like

some thing's very wrong here, I've got to get out of here.

I just remember Steve Coniglio and I we just ran out.

And we raced towards the doors; I fully expected

it to be locked.

And so I headed out that back door as fast

as I could in a panic.

I tore out of there, I ran down the stairs.

You've got one foot in the door, one foot out the door

and then all the lights came on and

it was Mr Jones standing at the back of the room

and he'd turned on the lights and he slowly walked

forward to the front of the room and he looked shaken.

I remember this sickening silence in the room;

it was almost like a sweating room it just got hotter

and hotter as this particular leader did not appear.

And then to release that tension I remember having

the students whisper some of our edicts like

strength through discipline, strength through community,

strength through action.

And I remember them louder sitting at attention

with their feet flat against the floor and their backs straight

you know strength through discipline,

strength through comm... bam ba ba ba ba ba, bam ba ba ba ba ba.

And then I remember this thing flickering there

as these students waited for this leader to appear.

And there was nothing, just this static.

Somebody yelled out “there is no party leader”.

At that point I snapped on this visual and it was Hitler

and it was the holocaust and it was bodies

and hollowed eyes and the horror

that we had fallen victim to.

MUSIC

And he sat in the chair and just said “what I have witnessed

for the last week and a half” or a week whatever it was

“what I have witnessed has really sickened me”.

Because we are no better or worse than the Germans,

we were just like them, we'd work on the defence plants,

we witnessed this desolation.

We're just like them.

You had to be there to see people crying you know

horribly and shocked that the look of shock was like

the Earth was ending you know and they didn't know

what to do, people couldn't walk, they were sitting down

on the chairs and some people wanted to leave,

didn't know whether to leave or not.

The lights were out as people were leaving,

I remember some students crying.

Some students having to hold other 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.

People took it serious and and then they found that

this what they did they were not proud of, I think that's

what hurt a lot of the people and that they could be taken,

nobody likes to be taken.

One of the lessons we learned is that in our class

what you were being threatened with was your grade

but in real life in a dictatorship

what you're threatened with is your life.

I hate to think that I go through life thinking

it's all about me but this was such a moment when

someone came to get me to say it's over, I thought

oh they've found me out, but in fact the movement

was over and she was calling me back to the classroom.

When I came back to the classroom my memory

of the students were that they looked liked mirages,

a mirage on the highway in the hot summer,

shaking appearance.

That's my memory of the students, they seemed to be

trembling, some of them seemed so shaky that if you

just did that to them they'd fall over.

I had that moment of total panic and my own uneducated

way empathy towards victims of a Nazi Third Wave like regime.

I'm half German and my name Hess,

you know my maiden name Hess is very German.

And, so there have always been issues about

how could this happen to the German people?

How could they do this? I remember when I was a young

child a Jewish boy in our neighbourhood giving us

a very hard time that you know the German's could have

done something and they could have thrown a brick

or something you know like there was some feeling of like

there could have been, there should have been

something we did, could have done.

And even though all my grandparents were born here

I still had this feeling of like you know in my body even

that there is something about being German that was

so shameful because this thing had happened.

And the German people didn't stop it, and then here we were

and all educated in recent history, this thing

having happened, and here it was happening,

you know it seemed to be like it's happening again,

oh my God, how could this happen?

I don't think it 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's 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.

From the time of The Third Wave ended until he was let go

a year later I think the mechanism was in the works

to get rid of him.

And I think there was just too many complaints

by the conservative teachers, too many complaints

by the conservative administration.

Oh yeah I don't think they liked his teaching methods.

I think they were scared.

Usually when people get scared that's what they do

they want to get rid of the person they're scared of

and I think that's how it happened.

Agnes Robinson, a member of the school board,

was probably the main proponent of let kids do

what they want to do, she was very permissive you know.

All my time on the school board I was the most radical

and I didn't hesitate to say what I believed

and I didn't hesitate to do what I thought was right

which then of course led me to the sad situation

that I had to give up on Jones.

I'm sure the fatal blow was the fact that this was

the year they either had to fire him or he would get tenure.

That was terrible and it was right

in this room and he came over one night

and we had a big long talk and I realised the situation

was just too difficult for me to continue

and be an honourable school board member.

So I had to tell him that I couldn't back him any more

and I remember feeling just terrible about it.

And, but what could I felt that, I felt as an honest person

I had to do it and then the school board

took over and knocked him off.

I remember being in the gym, there was such a movement

to keep him from being fired and and then it was

brought out that he was going to move on because

they were going to restrict the way that he taught

and that if he went up into the city that he would have

more freedom to teach in his own way

and that it was better for him.

But I felt a tremendous loss.

In the end bureaucracy is going to win somehow or other

I perhaps did him a favour

by getting him out this picture when I did.

Because then he could go on with his life and

preach what he really wanted to preach.

Probably 10 years after The Wave actually took place

I sat down one evening and wrote the story out.

I was over in Berkeley buying underwear

and some student came up and gave me the salute

and it forced it all to rush back.

I did pull up my hand to my shoulder and bring it back down

and we talked a bit about what he was doing

and what he was after, all of which I really

can't remember much about after all this time.

I sat down one evening and wrote the story out.

And there was an article in Psychology Today about this

and then that's where I read about Ron Jones short story.

It was published in the Fulworth catalogue,

subsequently purchased by Norman Lear

for a musical theatric version but turned out to be like

an after school special that was immediately bumped

into a prime time television drama.

The novelization of that film was written called.

The Wave and its required reading in Germany

and in a number of schools in Israel,

and in a number of schools in the United States.

PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT

MUSIC

INSTRUCTIVE CHATTERING

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

You said that you read it when you were 12

is it required reading in Germany?

Yes, yeah you have to read it in school because with

our past this experiment is the perfect example how fascism

can grow or how these kind of systems really work

and it's, so it's and it's always has been

a very popular book amongst students.

I think our aim was to tell the story and later on

if the audience will say I think if this must be the aim

then I would have been part of it as well, that's the best.

Being a group, being strong is something good

but when you're opinion doesn't count any more

then it's real bad and that's the moment I told Dennis

“okay now I think it's pretty good to do it because

it's a big story and it's worth to tell”.

Well after The Wave ended my life basically was,

I was cut off from what I thought would be my life

I had always planned that I would teach high school,

I would coach basketball, I would teach history.

I would be so happy in high school,

high school is a microcosm of life it's got all this

wonderful energy, the choir, the teams travelling,

the big game, the proms, the dances, the graduation,

the hope that exists in an American high school

is something just to always be around.

But I was never allowed to teach again following The Wave.

I'm here to give a poem called I love You.

I love you because you first loved me.

Well I'm currently teaching poetry to the mentally disabled

population artists for the most part and I conduct

workshops in poetry to find their voice

and it's often this intriguing unique voice.

Sunshine of my Life.

I worked my way through high school and college

doing piping design, western pipe and engineering

so I could have gone, that could have been a career

but it didn't involve people so.

I wanted to teach.

That's all I ever wanted to do.

I just wanted to have everybody turn around

and look at the back of the room and...

APPLAUSE

Strange isn't it?

Yes it is.

Why don't we say hello?

Well it is very weird. I'm sure it is for you as well

I mean I'm sitting here for the first time, I've been away

from Cubberley, I couldn't even drive passed.

Cubberley for years.

It's very strange to me that this one moment

gets extenuated to the point that it has

but I can't control that.

I can only be honest about what I experience

as a human being and as a teacher

and try to communicate that.

I thought it was fun, I thought it was interesting you know

interesting social experiment I think most people sort of

realised 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.

But I guess my other feeling on that was that it was scary

how people who didn't believe in it still went along with it.

You know that level of cynicism where they felt they'd get

an A so they'd go along and be a good Third Wave member.

I wasn't in your class but I remember walking down

the halls and seeing the students give the salutes

and I was frightened.

Yeah.

And I know this is an incredibly important lesson for all of us

and it was a very potent way of teaching it,

but would you do it that way again?

Oh no, no, no, this, you would never do this again.

This puts people at real danger it was a,

it was a big error by a very young teacher.

I was trying to find out about The Third Wave

as a reporter at the time.

The people that I would ask questions about it

would shut me down, that entire week, they wouldn't tell me

anything about it until I got a hold of the librarian

and she said she was going to talk to me

about it the next week.

And that Thursday, and this is a story I've never,

I never told my mother or anybody else, that Thursday

two members of the Car Club came in to

the journalism office and they knocked the breath

out of me and told me not to write about it.

Wow.

And a lot of what this is about is realising that it's your

own ground and your own embodiment that lets you

choose what makes sense for you to do.

It's good to be part of the tribe, it's nice to be a part

of the village, but you need to feel when the humanity

is being threatened and say something right away.

If if you're speaking up then other people

can resonate with it before it gets stamped.

Because the way you control people is

you control them physically.

And you verified the fact that it's... you just honoured

a human being in their efforts to do things right

and that allowed me to have a life that was full.

Not of doubt but of confidence, and without you

I would never have had that.

I mean there were moments when you simply stood up and said

this teacher is a little bit crazy perhaps

but he's not dangerous.

Now I believe it was one of the greatest lessons

I've ever been taught, was not to be controlled,

not to do anything that you honestly

within your own heart think you shouldn't do.

Anybody can be drawn in and become a part

just like they did in Germany.

And I think that was the most enlightening part about the

whole experiment was you're no different from the next person.

Anybody who is zealous about their cause

or anybody who's following a charismatic leader

is to me is suspect, especially after this experience.

I believe in middle ground and compromise not

firmly entrenched extreme positions.

And a crowd of people with an extreme position

I find very scary.

With the right manipulations any population,

no matter how educated and intelligent and liberal

liberal and free-thinking and wanting good, you know

we all wanted good things, we were very idealistic,

can be turned and manipulated into something

that's... could be very dangerous.

We should be wary of being too gullible.

If Ron Jones's behaviour after 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.

For some people the world is filled only with prisoners

and guards, power and powerlessness.

And you have a choice, do you want to be powerless

or do you want to be powerful? Everybody wants to be

powerful than powerless. And the question is

what are you willing to pay, what are you willing to do

to go from being powerless to be powerful.

And for most people it's an awful lot

they're willing to transgress a lot of

personal values to step across the line.

Am I glad that I experienced this?

I don't know where the wave of emotion comes from

apropos word - but yes I'm so incredibly grateful

for the experience and it was so important in my life

and continues to be.

It's my belief that it's in all of us if you are strong enough

to realise it's in you also when you say

"oh you poor fool, it could only happen to you."

If you can turn around in your own private moment

and say God I guess I could have done this too,

it could have happened to me,

maybe there's some hope that it won't happen again.

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