The Third Wave: A Teacher Builds a Movement in Five Days

In the spring of 1967, a 25-year-old history teacher named Ron Jones was asked a question he could not answer. A student in his class at Cubberley High School wanted to know how ordinary Germans could claim they never knew about the Holocaust. Jones had no satisfying reply. So on Monday, April 3, he decided to let his students find out for themselves. What follows is the week as Jones himself described it, in an account he published five years later. This is the story of a classroom experiment that lasted five days and grew far beyond the room where it began. It matters because it tested something uncomfortable. Would teenagers give up their freedom if a group offered them order, belonging and the feeling of being special? The first step looked harmless. Jones told his 30 sophomores to sit with feet flat on the floor, backs straight and hands flat across the small of their backs. Then he began timing them.