Catch A Wave

Can anyone recall a made for TV movie from the early Eighties called "The Wave?" It was about this suburban high school that became a sort of fascist hell after a "charismatic" teacher founded a youth group called The Wave. They had a special salute (fist to the chest and then to the air), special clothes, and the promise of being "part of something larger than yourself." Eventually, it all went to hell; The Wave kids excluded the other kids, and then started beating people up. Finally, the charismatic teacher revealed the "real" leader of The Wave to the kids: Adolf Hitler. Heavy, man.

I remember the movie as being full of It Could Happen Here overtones that seemed vaguely profound at the time. (Hey, I was 12!) Turns out, that the movie was based on a true story. Not only that, the school where The Wave was founded was right here in the Bay Area! "The Wave", ex-Teacher Ron Jones Looks Back

The story starts in the spring of 1967, when Jones was a first-year history teacher and basketball coach. It was a time and a place open to the style of teaching that Jones wanted to pursue after coming out of Stanford University with a master's degree in education and international relations.

Simulation was in vogue for introducing abstract ideas. One of the abstractions was fascism in World War II, and Jones decided to simulate it by turning his world history classroom into a one-day fascist state. It was a morning class of 25 or 26 sophomores, and Jones introduced discipline by having them practice marching into class in an orderly fashion and sitting at their desks with perfect posture and smiles.

Jones figured that was the end of it, but when he came in the second morning, they were all sitting with perfect posture again. They liked this game, and that is where the trouble began.

By the end of day two, participating students had developed a secret hallway salute, which caused enough campus curiosity that by day three there were 200 students or more, including kids who had heard about it at rival high schools Palo Alto and Gunn, jamming his classroom to be part of the Third Wave.

"Now it was not just a simulation," says Jones. "The Third Wave was becoming something bigger, and I was a victim of my own excitement. I loved the power of it and the adulation."

On the fourth day, Jones raised the stakes by telling his students that the Third Wave was part of a national movement. They were "the vanguard, the soldiers of the future" and they would hold a rally on day five to meet their national leader in a televised speech.

By then the Third Wave soldiers were in white shirts, and they crammed into a small auditorium. Jones turned the TV on to meet their new leader and it was nothing but white static. After a few confusing moments, a slide projector came on with images of Adolf Hitler indoctrinating his youth.

"I said, 'This is where we are going. We're no better and no worse than the Germans we've been studying,' " Jones says. "This is our future unless we understand the need for freedom."

The best part of this story; from its founding to the dramatic Hitler reveal, The Wave lasted 5 days. 5 days to fascism USA! Wow! Whether Americans are latent Nazis, or Bay Area teenagers are complete idiots, I will leave you to decide. For whatever reason, Bay Area-ites of that era were oddly susceptible to this sort of thing. The infamous and near-contemporaneous Zimbardo Prison Experiment happened just down the road at Stanford. Jim Jones was already preaching in the People's Temple. Most ominously, the Grateful Dead were gathering its tribe of "Deadheads" who would go on to take over stadium parking lots across the nation.

Jones, it turns out, did not last long as a teacher. He was not fired specifically for making fools of Palo Alto's Little Darlings, but he was let go soon after. Jones went on to be a "punk rocker" and to write 30 books, many about education. Oddly, Sundance screened a German film about The Wave a few years ago, which renewed Jones' interest in his little bit of infamy. He has since written a musical (!) about his experience and is reconnecting with some of his old students.