Ron Jones (born 1941) is an American writer and formerly a teacher in Palo Alto, California. He is internationally known for his classroom exercise called "The Third Wave" and the book he wrote about that event, which inspired the made-for-TV movie The Wave and other works, including a theatrical film in 2008. The original TV movie won the Emmy and Peabody Awards. His books The Acorn People and B-Ball have also been made into TV dramas. Jones lives in San Francisco, California where he regularly performs as a storyteller. Career 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 intended for this to be only a week-long exercise. He had a designed lesson plan which included a salute, a slogan, and a secret "police" force. The experiment was ended by Jones after complaints from teachers and parents. 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. Jones says that he was refused tenure at Cubberley High School as a result of his anti-war activities two years after the experiment. There were large student protests against this decision. Jones has spent the past 30 years working with people with mental disabilities and has written a number of books. Personal life Jones was raised on 46th Avenue in the Sunset District during the 1940s and 1950s. He lives in the Haight Ashbury of San Francisco, with his wife Deanna. He is Jewish. The Wave 1967 – "The Third Wave," a classroom simulation. 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 Wave" which simulated how a movement aimed at eliminating democracy can be created, even in a free society. 1976 – "Take as Directed", an account by Jones of the experiment was published