How far do you go to make a learning experience real for students? What is the boundary between ethical and unethical behaviour? Is a great learning experience worth your career?
Ron Jones explored all of these questions in his real life experiement called The Third Wave. Captured vividly in the insightful documentary Lesson Plan (http://iview.abc.net.au/programs/lesson-plan/ZX6433A001S00), it outlines how his social experiment played out in his school, its long term impact on the students and its impact today.
The interesting thing for me was that it is one of the best examples of experiental education in the Dewey mould. That is, he was able to recreate the environment in which the Germans felt compelled to support Adolf Hitler and thus show his students how easy it is to become enthralled with a charasmatic dictator. Moreover, the students to this day can still vividly recall the experience and a handful have used the experience to encourage them to promote the lessons learnt in their own lives.
Unfortunately, the all encompassing experience Jones created was also harmful to many of the students. The documentary does not try to hide the fact that some of the students felt socially isolated and fearful because they did not go along with The Third Wave. Shockingly, a student reporter at the time reveals that he was physically intimidated by other students because he was going to report on the class in the school newspaper.
This raises the question: did the important life lessons he taught his students justify the social unrest and hurt that he caused?
From a professional stand point it cost Jones his job at the school and he never worked as a teacher again. Despite his popularity among the student population, he lost the support of the school board because of his experiment (which was approved and supported by the principal) and different teaching style. However, he was also able to gain a semblance of fame because of the event and thus he has had a book, play and tv show produced because of the experiment.
From a student welfare stand point it is not so clear. For the students that learnt important life lessons and gained insight into Nazi Germany the experience was invaluable and it could be argued that no amount of reading, documentaries or other content could replicate that learning experience. However, for students who were emotionally or socially ostracised this would have been painful and one of the students still feels aggrieved.
Finally, from a broader social perspective you could argue that he did society a favour. Like Zimbardo's famous prison experiment, which similarly crossed ethical and moral boundaries and was argued to have gone on too long, this proved to society that the evils of Nazi Germany were not an isolated incident and that we need to be vigilent against charasmatic leaders with immoral agendas. Moreover, like Zimbardo, his social experiment has proved to be an invaluable teaching tool and the book The Wave is an essential text in German schools.
As a teacher I am torn about the merits of Jones' actions. Part of me admires him for being different and challenging the system. Not just in this instance but in the rest of his brief teaching career, Jones was seen as a radical that used new, active and experimental teaching methods to teach his subjects. As such, he was a popular teacher and students were engaged in his classes. However, the extent to which he manipulated the students was dangerous and bordered on creating his own cult of personality. I wonder how much of it was a social experiment and how much was for his own ego? Moreover, no such experiment would ever get approval today and any school that dared risk such a class would probably find itself on the end of a law suit.
What can we make of Ron Jones' social experiment? I think it belonged to a time where schools were more willing to try new things without the fear of legal action and also where students were more likely to buy into the discipline and messages he was selling. I find it hard to imagine a class of students now being as disciplined and blindly following orders as those students in the 1960s. However, I think he is to be commended on trying to make the learning real for his students and embracing the teachable moment in order to show them how easily society can be lead astray.
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