Mr. Wengel clearly underestimated the rapidity of totalitarianism, and the firm belief in liberal values of Maotou children. In fact, because freedom and democracy are "natural" human rights for these children - even from East Germany or Turkey - they don't have much deep liberal beliefs. Karo and Mona opposed the "wave" movement, the ideological justification was lacking (Karo talked to Reiner, also only to scare Mr. Vengel, saying he could not control the situation, as for the What's the matter, she doesn't know much about it). And Marco, who sensed something was wrong, just claimed to feel like a different person. As political students, they do not have the ideological self-awareness to review or even resist this movement.
The students only experienced the positive values (you can also call it "positive energy") brought about by the activity week, such as self-satisfaction, equality and mutual assistance, and collective glory (you can also call it "positive energy") at the level of belonging. Unaware and reacting to Tim's anomalous behavior.
I recently read "A Brief History of the Future", which mentioned that we can create an intersubjective reality, weave a web of meaning together, and trust each other. Currency, nation, brand, etc., are all webs of meaning constructed by common imagination. If viewed from this perspective, the difference between liberalism and totalitarianism is not so significant, so it seems more understandable, just one week, how a democratic country's interest class for middle school students has evolved into a Hitler Youth League.
Ps. It is more modeled than this teaching experiment, and there is the Stanford Prison Experiment (there is a movie of the same name, the research result of this experiment is "The Lucifer Effect - How Good People Become Demons").
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