Ethics of experimenting on students without telling them
Virtually every modern university has an ethics procedure for experiments conducted on human subjects.  If an academic wants to conduct an experiment on students (especially one that involves deception) they would generally need to put in a proposal to their university ethics board.  This would disclose the details of the proposed experiment, and the nature of any deception of subjects, and the university would make a decision as to whether or not to allow the experiment to proceed.

Experiments involving deception of subjects are often approved (many psychological experiments are of this kind), but it is usual to require that the subjects be "debriefed" after the experiment, to disclose to them the deception they were subjected to, and how the experiment worked.  In cases where the deception is likely to be distressing to the subjects, or the gains from the experiment are minor, the ethics board might decide not to allow the experiment to proceed, or might require it to be altered in some way.



Now, with regard to the particular situation described in the Atlantic article, this does not appear to be an academic experiment at all; it is an extended High School class exercise that uses some mild deception to illustrate the world of the book through mimicking aspects of it in the conduct of the classroom.  Students are subjected to some overbearing actions by the teacher to give them a small taste of totalitarianism.  Nothing described in the article would be unlawful, since at worst it involves cases of nasty looks, overbearing control, or dressing down a dissenter.

High Schools generally do not have formal ethics panels like the universities, since they do not conduct academic research.  It is likely that there is significant teacher discretion on how to conduct classes, but this would be subject to oversight by the school principal.  In this case I think it is unlikely that the exercise would have been subjected to any preliminary scrutiny of the kind that would occur in a university ethics application.  Obviously students would be free to object to this teaching exercise and take the matter up with the school principal, but this does not appear to be a case of experimentation that would go to an ethics board.

The basic ethical question at play here is: is it okay to be overbearing and mildly bullying to your students in order to give them a genuine taste of what totalitarianism is like.  Personally, I see no problem with the exercise, since the likely distress to students is mild in comparison to the value of the learning experience, and the students are made aware of the deception after the exercise is completed, so that they can discuss it in relation to the book.  Others may disagree, but to me it sounds like a very creative and useful teaching exercise, and the teacher doesn't take it too far.  I think it is quite brilliant, and I would happily enrol my own children in this class!