The Third Wave: How a 1967 Classroom Experiment Spawned Fascism

In April 1967, Ron Jones, a 25-year-old educator at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, initiated a social experiment aimed at teaching his 10th-grade history students about the Holocaust and Nazism. What began as a one-day lesson transformed into a five-day initiative known as the Third Wave, engaging 200 students who began to exhibit authoritarian traits through the use of slogans, salutes, and membership cards. As the movement expanded, Jones found it increasingly difficult to manage and ultimately concluded it after planning a rally, instead opting to screen a film about the Third Reich and disclose the experiment's intent. The experience left students deeply affected, and the Third Wave later inspired several media adaptations, such as the 1981 TV movie "The Wave" and the 2019 Netflix series "We Are the Wave." Notably, physicist Michio Kaku graduated from Cubberley in 1964.