Conformity Is A Dangerous Thing

"Power corrupts, and when you're in charge, you start doing things that you think are right, but they're actually not." - George Lucas

Children's literature, like all literature, is a power tool. I find myself using it again and again to help teach my students challenging and controversial issues. Whether I'm talking about bullying, poverty, race or religion I know there's a book to help me make my point. One of my favorite things to teach my students are the issues of conformity and power. I teach my curriculum through a social justice lens and have grown attached to use a book that I read when I was in middle school—The Wave.

It's a young adult novel written by Todd Strasser and it centers on an experiment that goes wrong at Gordon High School in the spring of 1969. A history teacher named Mr. Ben Ross is teaching his high school students about life in Third Reich Germany. Mr. Ross finds himself unable to answer his students' questions of how and why people went along with the Nazi regime so he begins an experiment which he calls The Wave. Its supposed to help his students understand how Germany allowed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party to rise to power but the experiment goes horribly wrong. It's a fictional account of a similar real-life experiment that took place in a high school history class in Palo Alto, California. 

I am such a fan of the book and its teachings because I feel like it does it job well. If you want to use it to talk about race, religion and and sexual identity in Nazi Germany than it's perfect for that. Its modern day implementation of how sweeping power can be offers examples of why Hitler and the Nazis were so effective. If you want to use it to teach your students about the dangers of conformity and power, as I do, then there's not better book. Because I use it in my social studies classroom there are several Common Core standards that it connects to with WWI and WWII. For example: C&G.1.3 says to analyze differing viewpoints on the scope and power of state and national governments (e.g. Federalists and anti-Federalists, education, immigration and healthcare). and E.1.1 asks to explain how conflict, cooperation, and competition influenced periods of economic growth and decline (e.g. economic depressions and recessions). 

Both standards are great starters for teaching in the form of "big questions" that show my students how power can be a sweeping thing. It also speaks to something happening in a middle schooler's lives which is their desire to "fit it." The Wave does a great job of showing students the dangers in doing something simply because so many other people are doing it. It asks them to question the actions of those "in power" and pushes the reader to determine what their own morals are.

All in all, I think the book does a great job of tying literature with historical information and modern day issues. If you haven't read it I definitely suggest it!