Years ago a John Hopkin's
professor gave a group of graduate students this assignment: Go to the slums.
Take 200 boys, between the ages of 12 and 16, and investigate their background
and environment. Then predict their chances for the future.
The students, after consulting
social statistics, talking to the boys, and compiling much data, concluded that
90 percent of the boys would spend some time in jail.
Twenty-five years later
another group of graduate students was given the job of testing the prediction.
They went back to the same area. Some of the boys - by then men - were still
there, a few had died, some had moved away, but they got in touch with 180 of
the original 200. They found that only four of the group had ever been sent to
jail.
Why was it that these men, who
had lived in a breeding place of crime, had such a surprisingly good record? The
researchers were continually told: "Well, there was a teacher..."
They pressed further, and
found that in 75 percent of the cases it was the same woman. The researchers
went to this teacher, now living in a home for retired teachers. How had she
exerted this remarkable influence over that group of children? Could she give
them any reason why these boys should have remembered her?
"No," she said, "no I really
couldn't." And then, thinking back over the years, she said musingly, more to
herself than to her questioners: "I just loved those boys...."
-Author Unknown
