Lesson Plan

Himself, professor, Stanford University:
One of the most basic human needs is the need of social belonging, and 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 just this once we're going to step across because the group is pushing us. The other thing about the human mind is it has infinite power to justify any behavior, either before doing it to say 'here's why we do it', then after you do it to say 'here's why we had to do it'. Human beings are more rationalizing than rational, that is we like to think we're rational, we weigh the alternatives, but in fact what we are a people who can reexplain 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 be perverted to justify any evil, any transgression.

Ron Jones:
I thought it would be a one day exercise; it turned out to be a one week existence in terror, actually.

Ron Jones:
My ego was inflated, my sense of power and control were elevated, and I liked it, that's the problem. But I'm at least aware of it. 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, this is very dangerous'.

Himself, professor, Stanford University:
What Ron Jones, as far as I understood, was trying to do is have American students of the 60s appreciate the ease with which, similar students in Germany became part of Hitler's youth.

Mark Hancock:
I've seen websites where they want to take the students and test them all to see if they're normal. And I've seen websites that think we, that bought the fictional version think we were all truly nasty kids, which we were not, and I really don't 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. Last time I was at Cubberly was probably 25 years ago, maybe 30. I've been sharing this story with people for almost 40 years.

Ron Jones:
I stumbled upon a bit of human nature in 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.

Jo Ann Wood:
When I first met Ron Jones I thought, "God he is so young, he's like one of us!"

Philip Carr Neel:
Ron would come to work in just a white shirt and oftentimes without a tie, and roll up his sleeves.

Joel Amkraut:
He was doing innovative things at the time too. He was bringing guests to the class, very interesting, controversial guests: he brought in a communist, he brought in a Klansman, he brought in a member of the American Nazi Party to talk about white supremacy.

Alyssa Hess:
All the way through he was presenting different sides of every question. I remember when we were studied about Vietnam, he made us write 10 arguments for, 10 arguments against,

Steve Coniglio:
He didn't try to be above you, I'd say that Ron Jones had a capacity to teach WITH you.

Russel Mulock:
When he said he did simulations, I realized that's a lot of what he lived for, he liked creating the experience of being there.

Alyssa Hess:
You know, I feel like he was trying to look at the whole picture, always, and try to get us to look at the whole picture, always, with a lot of heart and a lot of passion.

Jo Ann Wood:
It was always exciting, one day you'd go in and the desks would be in a row, and then the next they'd come in and be all spread all over the room.

Wendy Brodie:
I remember clearly from him and the classmates, that if we followed with was asked of us, we'd all get A's.

Mark Hancock:
You need good grades to get into college, and you actually needed specific classes, so you needed to pass this class.

Alyssa Hess:
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 an implied threat, like something bad would happen.

Mark Hancock:
He said 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.

Sherry Tousley:
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 even free to have their own beliefs.

Mark Hancock:
Another rule was to not gather in groups larger than two, both in class and out of class, and off campus, even at home.

Wendy Brodie:
I don't think we were to talk too much other than if you have a trusted friend maybe bring them in.

Sherry Tousley:
I am a big question asker and lo and behold that's what I did, 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 of what we think about the Third Wave?' And at that point, he said, 'You to the library for the rest of the semester'.

Russel Mulock:
Things that I do remember happened in my classroom was somebody indeed was sent to the library, that at more than one time, people were banished from the class.

Philip Carr Neel:
You were a hundred percent or you were not, and so if you even had a doubt about something he would say and you mention that, he would send you out.

Jo Ann Wood:
People would just disappear, and that nobody was allowed to even talk about it made it even more mysterious.

Wendy Brodie:
And it's not like you saw them after class or after school and say 'hey what's this all about?'

Sherry Tousley:
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 to collect our names and kick us out, so was fearful to tell the librarian why I was there, but she was really on me. She wanted to 'What are you doing here? You need to be in class'. So I remember just taking a really deep breath and thinking 'Well, I've got to tell her and okay, maybe she turns my name in and I'm already out, I already have the out, so what else can they do?' but it was still very intimidating to me, very much so to tell her. But I did describe to her the nature of the movement as I had come to understand it 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 is try to think 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 the hallways were outdoors, and I could just go and put up posters and so for that first night I just felt like 'Yes, 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'd torn down every poster.

Ron Jones:
I don't remember asking a student to take down posters, per se.

Sherry Tousley:
The next night I went home after school and repeated my poster making obsession behavior and took a ladder to the school the next day. 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.

Richard Schloss:
My name is Rick Schloss, I was a senior at Cubberly 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 are two guys standing behind it, there is a banner on the wall, and the banner says 'The 3rd Wave', underneath 'The 3rd Wave' it said 'Strength through unity'. At this point, one of the guys comes around the table and asks 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 asked him what it was he said 'Strength through unity'. That's all he could tell me. I asked him 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 gonna 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 going actually to be confrontational. At that time I was getting ready to go to battle. It looked like it was going to be a fist fight right here in the hallway.

Philip Carr Neel:
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 is going to come on any minute now', and he left the room with it on, it was just snow.

Steve Coniglio:
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.

Mark Hancock:
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.

Steve Coniglio:
I looked around and all I could see were gray faces, and everybody zombie-like, staring at the screen, waiting for something to happen.

Mark Hancock:
It was like a pressure cooker, and you, we just felt that something was wrong, the TV wasn't working, the teacher wasn't here, the guards were gone, and basically the students were sitting in here alone.

Steve Coniglio:
Everybody looked like they were dead, I just... and... my mind flipped... my mind flipped to... to like... the Jews in the concentration camp, being told they're going to a room to take a shower, doors shutting and then the pellets being dropped from the pipes up above. And I... I... I thought we were trapped. I went into a panic, I stood up and I said 'I'm getting the hell out of here!'

Mark Hancock:
We basically panicked, in my case it was 'Something is very wrong here, I gotta get out of here!'

Russel Mulock:
I remember Steve Coniglio and I, we just ran out.

Steve Coniglio:
And we raced toward the doors, I fully expected it to be locked.

Mark Hancock:
And so I headed out that back door as fast as I could in a panic.

Steve Coniglio:
I tore out of there, I ran down the stairs.

Wendy Brodie:
You've got one foot in the door, one foot out the door, and then all the lights came on.

Philip Carr Neel:
And it was Mr. Jones standing in the back of the room, he'd turned on the lights. And he slowly walked forward to the front of the room, and he looked shaken.

Ron Jones:
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 had the students whisper some of our edicts like 'Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action'. And I remember them getting louder, sitting at attention with their feet flat against the floor, "Strength through discipline, strength through community, BAM badda badda, BAM badda badda". And then I remember this thing flickering as these students waited for this leader to appear, and there was nothing, just this static.

Philip Carr Neel:
Somebody yelled out 'There is no party leader'!

Ron Jones:
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.

Philip Carr Neel:
And he sat in the chair and just said 'What I have witnessed for the last week and a half', or week, whatever it was, 'What I have witnessed has really sickened me'.

Ron Jones:
Because we are no better or worse than the Germans, we are just like them.