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.
The class took to it immediately. Students who normally slouched were sitting at attention. Answers got sharper. The room, by Jones’s own recollection, felt oddly good — the small daily uncertainties of a high school classroom simply vanished when someone else decided exactly how you sat and spoke.
He came in Tuesday expecting the novelty to have worn off. Instead the students were already in position before the bell.
Day two: Strength through community
So he pushed. He added a second slogan to the board — Strength through community — and gave the movement a name: The Third Wave. He taught them a salute, a cupped right hand curved up toward the shoulder, and told them to use it whenever they saw another member, in the halls, on the bus, anywhere.
The details of what happened next are drawn from Jones’s own written account, from later interviews he gave to the San Francisco Chronicle, and from the testimony of former Cubberley students who appear in the documentary.
Membership cards were issued. Some cards were marked with a red X — those students were designated informants, tasked with reporting anyone who broke the rules or spoke against the movement. Students volunteered eagerly for the role.
Day three: The class doubles
By Wednesday the experiment had leaked out of Jones’s classroom. Students from other classes were skipping their own lessons to sit in on his. The class had grown to more than 40, then more. The Mercury News, in its coverage of the documentary, describes how quickly the group began policing itself — students turning in classmates for insufficient enthusiasm, for slouching, for failing to salute in the corridor.
Jones added a third slogan: Strength through action. He instructed each member to recruit a new one by the next day, on the condition that the recruit be taught the rules and the salute properly. Attendance climbed. Grades, oddly, climbed too. Students who had never volunteered an answer were suddenly delivering them in crisp three-word bursts.
One girl, according to Jones’s account, told him that her father — a former prisoner of war — had walked into her bedroom, seen her practising the salute in the mirror, and left the room without saying anything.
Day four: The rally is announced
By Thursday, Jones later admitted, he was frightened by how much he was enjoying it. He announced a fourth slogan — Strength through pride — and told the assembled students, now well over a hundred, that The Third Wave was not a classroom exercise at all. It was a nationwide movement. There were chapters in more than a thousand high schools across the country. At noon the following day, a presidential candidate would appear on national television to announce the movement to the public. A rally would be held in the school auditorium at that same hour to watch the broadcast together.
None of this was true. There was no national leader. There was no broadcast. There were no other chapters. Jones had no plan for what would happen at noon on Friday.
Day five: 200 students in an auditorium
On Friday, roughly 200 students filed into the auditorium at Cubberley High. Accounts of the exact number vary slightly between sources; the Palo Alto community’s own recollections and Jones’s writings place the figure at around 200. Some were his own students. Many were not. They sat in rows, facing a blank television screen, waiting for a leader who did not exist.
Jones let the silence run. Then he switched on the television. Static. Nothing. The students kept waiting. He let them wait longer.
Then he told them the truth. There was no movement. There was no candidate. There was no announcement. What there was, he said, was a room full of teenagers who in five days had built exactly the kind of thing they had spent the previous week insisting ordinary people would never build. They had informed on their friends. They had recruited strangers. They had saluted in the hallways. They had felt good doing it.
He then screened footage of the Nuremberg rallies. Students walked out of the auditorium in silence. Some were crying. Some, according to former participants interviewed decades later, did not speak to Jones again for years.
Why it worked
The Third Wave has since become one of the most cited pieces of pedagogical folklore in the study of authoritarian movements, referenced in psychology courses, restaged in a television film The Wave, and dramatised in the German feature Die Welle and the Netflix series We Are the Wave, which Esquire traces directly back to the Cubberley classroom.
The mechanism, as Jones and later commentators have described it, was not fear. Nobody was threatened. Nobody was punished in any meaningful sense. What the students were offered was relief — from the small daily work of deciding how to sit, how to speak, what to think of themselves. In its place they were given clear rules, a shared identity, a salute, an enemy (anyone outside the group), and the flattering suggestion that they were part of something larger than a sophomore history class.
Grades improved because the rules were simple. Attendance improved because belonging felt good. Informing felt like participation. The salute felt like recognition. None of it required a threat.
What Jones said afterwards
Jones left Cubberley a few years later and went on to work with adults with developmental disabilities in San Francisco, and to write and direct theatre. In interviews connected to the release of the documentary in 2020, he has been unsparing about his own role.
He has spoken repeatedly about the danger of what happened and his responsibility for it. That he enjoyed the power. Not that the students enjoyed following. That he enjoyed leading.
A footnote on Cubberley
Cubberley High School closed as a comprehensive high school in the late 1970s, a casualty of falling enrolment in Palo Alto. The campus still stands, used now as a community centre and by smaller programmes. The auditorium where 200 students sat in April 1967 waiting for a leader who did not exist is still there.
Palo Alto’s civic history has a habit of producing outsized cultural moments in small rooms — from garages that became technology companies to the kitchen-table meetings that produced the Magical Bridge playground movement. The Third Wave belongs on that list too, though it is the one Palo Alto talks about least. It took five days, one teacher, three chalkboard slogans, and a cupped-hand salute to build something that a class of American teenagers, when told the truth about what they had done, could not look at without crying.
Jones, now in his eighties, still gives the same answer when asked how long it would take to do it again. Five days. Maybe four.