The out-of-control social experiment at the heart of The Wave is one unorthodox educator’s attempt to really connect with his students—and to teach them important life lessons they won’t soon forget. Ben Ross doesn’t want his students to memorize facts out of their textbook; he wants to truly educate them in the ways of the world. As Ross’s experiment flies off the handle, however, and his students’ feelings, reputations, and in some cases their lives come under threat, Strasser calls into question what the responsibilities of education are. Strasser ultimately suggests that while it is not enough to encourage students to do rote learning devoid of curiosity or practical understanding of the concepts they’re studying, the role of a teacher is never one that justifies toying with the lives of students, even in the name of enriching their education.
Ben Ross is, arguably, the primary antagonist of The Wave. Despite his good intentions and his fierce beliefs in the power of education, Ross takes his role as an educator a bit too far when he creates The Wave. The effects his experiment has on his students’ lives are indelible—and ethically dubious. Ross is introduced as a teacher who truly loves teaching. He is a restless thinker and deeply inquisitive man who doesn’t want to settle for just teaching his students facts out of a textbook—he wants them to engage with the world around them, consider deeply the lessons of history, and really think about how what they’re learning applies to their lives and relationships.
Ben’s intentions are good—but his methods for pushing the boundaries of the role of the educator are faulty. Ben is an obsessive person whose wife Christy notes that he often gets “utterly absorbed in [things] to the point where he tend[s] to forget that the rest of the world exist[s.]” Whatever Ben’s preoccupation of the month is—be it playing bridge, investigating the history of Native Americans, or answering his students’ complicated questions about the Holocaust—he reads, studies, and ponders it obsessively until the itch fizzles out. This is a major personality flaw in Ben Ross—but his obsession with getting to the root of his students’ questions about the Nazis is the spark that lights the fire of The Wave.
Ben Ross is excited by his students’ emotional reactions to their unit on World War II and the Holocaust, and becomes determined to stoke their wide-ranging feelings and deep-seated questions about Hitler and the Nazis. By creating The Wave, Ross is attempting to show students how easily conformity, groupthink, and rigor can seize and transform a population—but he has no idea just how completely swept up his students will soon become. By subjecting his students to a social experiment, Ross flexes his unorthodox teaching methods and is “pleased” with the results—but he doesn’t take the time to consider that the young, malleable minds entrusted to him each day are too impressionable for such a grave, serious exercise.
As The Wave surges throughout Gordon High and begins engendering discord, cruelty, and even violence, Ross realizes what he’s done—but is afraid he’s powerless to stop the students’ trajectory. In trying to expand the social construct of the student-teacher relationship, Ross has obliterated necessary boundaries and toyed with his students’ minds and actions. They’ve taken his experiment and run away with it on their own—and like the young people in novels like The Lord of the Flies and The Chocolate War, a new social order run entirely by children has taken hold of Gordon High. As pressure from Principal Owens and the school’s parents bears down on Ross, he knows that his experiment has gone much too far, and that he must try to reign it back in. If he can’t, he faces losing not just his job but his reputation—and admitting to the fact that his educational ethos is flawed and volatile.
At the end of the novel, after Ross successfully brings The Wave to a halt, Ross confides in Laurie Saunders that he is planning to “skip” the lesson of The Wave in “next year’s course”—implying that he has learned from his actions and will not experiment with his students’ lives again. Strasser uses Ross’s anxiety and shame in the latter half of the novel—in stark contrast to the excitement, pride, and self-confidence he felt in the early days of The Wave experiment—to show that the code between students and their teachers is a sacred one. Teachers take on the responsibility of molding, shaping, and caring for students’ minds and hearts alike—and in using them like lab rats in pursuit of one’s own existential questions or obsessions, one violates that delicate boundary and may even put lives at risk.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Education ThemeTracker
Education Quotes in The Wave
“How could the Germans sit back while the Nazis slaughtered people all around them and say they didn’t know about it? How could they do that?” […]
“All I can tell you,” Ben said, “is that the Nazis were highly organized and feared. The behavior of the rest of the German population is a mystery—why they didn’t try to stop it, how they could say they didn’t know. We just don’t know the answers.”
Eric’s hand was up again. […] “I would never let such a small minority of people rule the majority.”
“Yeah,” said Brad. “I wouldn’t let a couple of Nazis scare me into pretending I didn’t see or hear anything.”
After Ben Ross shows his senior history students a film about the Holocaust, their reactions range from disinterested to deeply disturbed. Laurie Saunders is the most perturbed member of the class, unable to understand how the Nazis could “slaughter” Jews, Roma, and homosexual and disabled individuals in their death camps—and how ordinary Germans could stand by while the atrocities occurred. This exchange between Laurie, Ross, and two other members of the class, Brad and Eric, sets up many of the fundamental thematic questions that The Wave will investigate. The bystander phenomenon as well as the dangers of groupthink are at the heart of the classroom experiment that Ross will soon devise to give his students a “taste” of life in Nazi Germany—and though Eric and Brad claim they would never let a “small minority” rule them or “scare them into” doing certain things, both boys will soon become dedicated members of a movement that thrives on conformity, coercion, and intimidation. Ross’s students claim to be baffled by the social and moral breakdowns that allowed the Nazis to take control of Germany, but ultimately, the novel will show just how susceptible even these well-informed and seemingly autonomous students are to the dangers of groupthink, blind allegiance, and historical amnesia.
Suppose, [Ross] thought, just suppose he took a period, perhaps two periods, and tried an experiment. Just tried to give his students a sampling, a taste of what life in Nazi Germany might have been like. If he could just figure out how it could be done, how the experiment could be run, he was certain it would make far more of an impression on the students than any book explanation could ever make. It certainly was worth a try.
He had told his wife how surprisingly enthusiastic his students had been that afternoon, but he had not told her that he too had gotten caught up in it. It would almost be embarrassing to admit that he could get swept up in such a simple game. But yet on reflection he knew that he had. The fierce exchange of questions and answers, the quest for perfect discipline—it had been infectious […] Interesting, he thought as he got into bed.
“This will be our symbol. A wave is a pattern of change. It has movement, direction, and impact. From now on, our community, our movement will be known as The Wave.” He paused and looked at the class standing at stiff attention, accepting everything he told them. “And this will be our salute,” he said, cupping his right hand in the shape of a wave, then tapping it against his left shoulder and holding it upright. “Class, give the salute,” he ordered.
The class gave the salute.
“When we first began The Wave a few days ago I felt that some of you were actually competing to give the right answers and to be better members than others. From now on I want this to end. […] You must conceive of yourselves as a team, a team of which you are all members. Remember, in The Wave you are all equals. No one is more important or more popular than anyone else and no one is to be excluded from the group. Community means equality within the group.”
Ben noticed a marked improvement in preparation for class and in class participation, but he also noticed that there was less thinking behind the preparation. His students could glibly spit back answers as if by rote, but there was no analysis, no questioning on their part.
Ben stepped out into the hall and started down toward the principal’s office. On the way more than a dozen students paused to give him The Wave salute. He returned them and continued quickly, wondering what [Principal] Owens was going to say. In one sense, if Owens was going to tell him that there had been complaints and that he should stop the experiment, Ross knew he would feel some relief.
“I created this experiment, and they went along. If I stop now they’ll all be left hanging. They’d be confused, and they wouldn’t have learned anything.
“Well, let them be confused,” Christy said.
[…] “I can’t do that!” he shouted at his wife. “I’m their teacher. I was responsible for getting them into this. I admit that maybe I did let this go too long. But they’ve come too far to just drop it now. I have to push them until they get the point. I might be teaching these kids the most important lesson of their lives!”
[Ross] recalled those students in his own history classes who had condemned the Jews for not taking the Nazi threat seriously, for not fleeing […] when rumors of the concentration camps and gas chambers first filtered back to them. Of course, Ross thought, how could any rational person believe such a thing? And who could have believed that a nice bunch of high school students […] could have become a fascist group called The Wave?
Ben began to realize how much more serious this “little experiment” was than he’d ever imagined. It was frightening how easily they would put their faith in your hands, how easily they would let you decide for them. If people were destined to be led, Ben thought, this was something he must make sure they learned: to question thoroughly, never to put your faith in anyone’s hands blindly. Otherwise…
“You thought you were so special!” Ross told them. “Better than everyone else outside of this room. You traded your freedom for what you said was equality. But you turned your equality into superiority over non-Wave members. You accepted the group’s will over your own convictions, no matter who you had to hurt to do it. [..].] You all would have made good Nazis,” Ben told them. […] You say it could never happen again, but look how close you came.”
Ben moved closer to the front of the stage and spoke in a lower voice. “If history repeats itself, you will all want to deny what happened to you in The Wave. But, if our experiment has been successful, […] you will have learned that we are all responsible for our own actions, and that you must always question what you do rather than blindly follow a leader, and that for the rest of your lives, you will never, ever allow a group’s will to usurp your individual rights.”
