The weird thing is that there must be fifty thousand video reenactments he could have shown them. Hell, when I was in fifth grade, they made me watch one - on a goddamned reel-to-reel projector.
When I was just a sprat, there was this TV program, like a short-film. Often billed or presented as an After-School Special, although I don't think it strictly was. At any rate it was called "The Wave", it was made back in like the 70's or 80's or something; but even so, educators in the era of my school years seemed to have something of a love-affair with it. It claimed to be based on true events, for certain values of the term "true" at least.
The plot revolves around a social studies teacher who is covering World War 2 in his high school class when a student asks him how the ordinary citizens of Germany could stand by doing and saying nothing while the Nazi Party openly committed atrocities on their behalf. Struggling for some reason to answer this question, the teacher devises an experiment where one day in his class he starts a group which appears to have no function except to engage in a fascism LARP for its own sake, and declares the entire class to now belong to it. He teaches them a jingoistic mantra and hand-gestures and makes them repeat them over and over, and stuff like that. I forget what the upside of it was supposed to be - improved grades or something? Not sure but whatever, most of the class oddly digs it and soon begins recruiting members from outside the class itself. After some unspecified length of time it's implied (quite improbably, it has to be said) that a huge number, like perhaps the majority of the school's students, have been absorbed into the group, with members beginning to harass, bully, and even beat up non-members and resisters. At last at the pleading of the last few holdouts to end the nightmare, the teacher informs everyone that the group is just one local chapter of a national youth movement, and announces an assembly in the auditorium on such-and-such a day in which the leader of the movement will give a televised address to the students. They all absolutely pack the auditorium to the rafters at the appointed time, and the "presentation" begins, which for a while is nothing but a big projector screen with static on it. The students start fidgeting and eventually start calling out the teacher, and suddenly he hits a button and scenes of Nazi rallies from "Triumph of the Will" start playing, and the teacher points at Hitler's gigantic black-and-white mug and declares "HERE IS YOUR LEADER!" and starts lecturing the stupid kids about how they so easily let themselves be turned into Nazis and that's exactly what happened to the Germans in WWII. The end.
Firstly, just to get things out of the way, many years ago I read an article which explains that the "true experiment" the movie was based on was
tremendously exaggerated in the retelling by the teacher who did it, in almost every way - talking the success of the experiment, the number of kids who participated (more like three or four dozen tops), the fact that any kind of violence or bullying took place, the stinger at the end, all of it - so the movie really represents I guess the fantasized idealization of the experiment that existed in the teacher's own head rather than what actually happened. I can't find the article anymore though, so feel free to take all that as apocryphal if you want. Anyway, let's assume for a moment that the movie is more or less 100% accurate, because that's what all the teachers who loved to show it seemed to want us to think anyway.
Like I said, teachers seemed to love this flick - during my life my family moved around a lot, so I went to several different school districts over time and I solidly remember being shown this movie
in-class in at least two different districts, maybe even three. It was quite obvious the teachers who showed it thought the main character-teacher was some kind of genius and this experiment was so obviously the perfect way to impart the lesson; even the climax where he declares Hitler their leader was obviously intended to be some kind of TOUCHDOWN moment - ha ha, your hero is Adolf Hitler, that's what you all get for being little Nazis.
This movie
horrified me, but NOT for the reasons the teachers obviously wanted it to. I already
knew Nazis=bad and fascism=dangerous, this movie didn't actually teach me anything new on that front. Taking the "true events" slugline on good faith, it horrified me that a teacher would consider an experiment like this to be the only or even an
acceptable way to answer the student's question from the beginning of the movie. And he's so clearly the hero of the narrative too - he would never have to answer for turning his class into a horde of fascists who went around tormenting and actually physically attacking other students as a way of answering a question about how the Nazis happened, because the Ends of delivering the lesson justified the Means used to deliver it. I was at least thankful that my own teachers considered that a simple movie with such a plot was sufficient to impart the lesson, and wondered with no little distress why it never occurred to THAT teacher to try something similar instead.
