In April 1967, while working as a teacher at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, Jones created a project with his 15-year-old World History students in which they experienced the growth of a fascist movement, called The Wave.
Jones then revealed that it was an exercise intended to give students a direct experience of how easily they could be misled into behaving like fascists, drawing parallels to the rise of the National Socialist movement in Germany.
[citation needed] Jones says that he was refused tenure at Cubberley High School as a result of his anti-war activities two years after the experiment.
Jones created a week-long project for his sophomore History class at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto that was studying Nazi Germany.
The experiment was designed to explore the question of how was it that the people of Germany could allow the rise of Fascism under National Socialism and claim ignorance of the atrocities that were committed by them to neighbors and friends.
Jones called the classroom experiment "The Third Wave" which simulated how a movement aimed at eliminating democracy can be created, even in a free society.
1981 – The Wave, The Classroom Experiment That Went Too Far, a novelization of the TV movie by Todd Strasser (published in Europe under the pseudonym Morton Rhue).