In the first week of April 1967, a history teacher at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto wrote three words on a chalkboard — Strength through discipline — and told his sophomore world history class they were going to try an experiment. Five days later, roughly 200 students were sitting at attention in a school auditorium, giving a cupped-hand salute, waiting for their teacher to introduce them to the leader of a national youth movement that did not exist. His name was Ron Jones. He shut the whole thing down that afternoon.
The experiment is known as The Third Wave, and more than half a century later Jones still calls it one of the most frightening things he ever watched happen in a classroom.
The question he could not answer
Jones was teaching at Cubberley High School. By the accounts of former students collected in the 2020 documentary The Invisible Line, he was the popular teacher, the one whose room other kids drifted into during free periods. That spring he was working through a unit on Nazi Germany when a student asked something he could not answer from a textbook: how did ordinary Germans go along with it, and then afterwards claim they had not known what was happening?
Instead of assigning a reading, he decided to show them. He told the class they were going to run a short experiment. He would be in charge. They would follow along. He planned for it to last a single day.
Day one: Strength through discipline
That first Monday, Jones wrote Strength through discipline on the board and laid down rules that were almost silly on their face. Sit up straight. Feet flat. Back against the chair. To ask or answer a question, stand beside your desk, address him as Mr. Jones, and keep your answer to three words or fewer…