Third wave. A lesson everyone should learn

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Ron Jones taught history at a high school in California. While studying World War II, one of the students asked Jones how ordinary people in Germany could pretend not to know anything about the concentration camps and the massacres in their country.

Since the class was ahead of the curriculum, Jones decided to set aside one week for an experiment on the subject.

On Monday he explained to the students. Jones instructed the students to sit at attention, as this is better for learning. Then he ordered the students to stand up and sit down in a new position several times, then also repeatedly ordered them to leave the audience and quietly enter and take their places. The schoolchildren liked the "game" and they willingly followed the instructions. Jones instructed the students to answer the questions clearly and vividly, and they obeyed with interest, even the usually passive students.

On Tuesday, Jones explained to the class sitting at attention on their own. He told the students to chant in chorus: "Strength in discipline, strength in community." The students acted with obvious enthusiasm, seeing the strength of their group. At the end of the lesson, Jones showed the students the greeting they were supposed to use when meeting each other - a raised, curved right hand to the shoulder - and called the gesture the Third Wave salute. In the following days, the students regularly greeted each other with this gesture.

Thirteen more volunteers joined the 30 students in the test class on Wednesday, and Jones decided to give out membership cards. He told Fr. Individual rivalries are often frustrating, he says, and group activities are more successful in learning. Jones instructed the students to jointly design the Third Wave banner, convince twenty children from a nearby elementary school to land at attention, and name one reliable student at a time to join the experiment. Three students were assigned to report to Jones about the breach of the established order and criticism of the Third Wave, but in practice about 20 people engaged in voluntary denunciations. One of the students, Robert, with a large physique and low learning ability, told Jones that he would be his bodyguard, and followed him throughout the school. The three most successful female students of the class, whose abilities were not in demand in the new conditions, reported the experiment to their parents. As a result, Jones received a call from the local rabbi, who was satisfied with the answer that the class was learning the German personality type in practice. The rabbi promised to explain everything to the parents of the schoolgirls. Jones was extremely disappointed by the lack of resistance even from adults, and the headmaster greeted him with a Third Wave salute.

On Thursday morning, the auditorium was trashed by the father of one of the students, who was waiting for Jones in the hallway. He was not himself, explained his behavior by German captivity and asked to understand him. Jones, trying to speed up the completion of the experiment, explained to the students. The 80 students in the classroom heard that they were part of a nationwide youth program whose mission was political transformation for the benefit of the people. Jones ordered four guards to escort three girls out of the auditorium and escort to the library, whose loyalty was questionable. Then he said that hundreds of Third Wave branches have been created in other regions of the country, and at noon on Friday, the leader of the movement and a new candidate for the presidency will announce their creation on television.

At noon Friday, 200 students crammed into the office, including representatives of youth subcultures who were not interested in school affairs in principle. Jones's friends posed as photographers circling the audience. At noon the TV was on, but nothing appeared on the screen. Seeing the bewilderment of the students, Jones admitted that the movement does not exist, and the students abandoned their own opinions and easily succumbed to manipulation. According to him, their actions did not differ much from the behavior of the German people in critical years. The schoolchildren dispersed in a depressed state, many could not hold back their tears.

The experiment was spontaneous and for a long time remained unknown to the broad masses, aided by the shame of its participants for their actions. In the late 1970s, Jones published the history of the experiment in his pedagogical book, up to this point the only description of the experiment had been made by the school newspaper. In 1981, the novel and the American television movie The Wave, based on an experiment, were released. In 2008, the German film Experiment 2: The Wave was released. In 2010, a documentary film was released in the United States, including interviews with participants in the experiment.