On the final day of the experiment, Jones gathered his students in the auditorium for an announcement, claiming that they’d be watching a broadcast of The Third Wave’s leaders announcing its national proliferation. As the experiment expanded throughout the school it took on a life of its own, and students began taking membership in “The Third Wave” very seriously, even reporting one another’s anti-“Wave” sentiments or actions to Mr. Jones later created a salute for his students to greet one another with and referred to the movement into which he was indoctrinating them all as “The Third Wave,” a dark play on the term The Third Reich. To demonstrate how such events could have happened, Jones began a five-day experiment called The Wave, enforcing strict classroom discipline and running drills in order to create an atmosphere of conformity and compliance. He had begun a lesson plan about the Holocaust, and he was having trouble answering questions from students as to how German citizens and soldiers could have turned a blind eye to the atrocious activities of the Nazi party-or worse, followed orders themselves. Strasser lives with his wife in Westchester County, New York.ĭuring the first week of April 1967, history teacher Ron Jones began an experiment at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, CA. Strasser’s work has on occasion been regarded as controversial and criticized for being racially insensitive, and his novel American Terrorist-which many pre-publication reviewers saw as Islamophobic-was pulled from publisher Simon & Schuster’s publication lineup in 2016. Strasser’s novels have also been adapted into films-for example, 1996’s How I Created My Perfect Prom Date was adapted into the popular 1999 teen flick Drive Me Crazy. The television special was itself inspired by the “Third Wave” teaching experiment that took place at a Palo Alto high school in 1981. The Wave is without a doubt his best-known work, but many readers may be surprised to learn that it, too, is actually a novelization of a 1981 ABC television special.
Todd Strasser, a native of New York City and an alum of Wisconsin’s Benoit College, is the author of several popular books for children and young adults, many of which are novelizations of television shows and movies including Jumanji and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
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