“And they were astonished at His teaching” (Mark 1:22).
Back in the 1950s, graduate students at Johns Hopkins University began a study of
200 selected young men between the ages of twelve and sixteen who lived in an “emotionally, economically, and culturally deprived inner-city ghetto.” When they had completed their analysis of those young men’s economic, social and cultural environment, the student-researchers were instructed to make certain predictions as to where the 200 youngsters would be twenty-five years hence. Among the several predictions made was this: “Within twenty-five years, 196 of the 200 subjects would have done some jail time.”
Twenty-five years later, another group of graduate students were assigned to track down the 200 subjects and check on the accuracy of the prediction. In due course,
180 of the 200 subjects were located, and only 6 of that number had spent any time at all in jail. The graduate students were then challenged to discover why the great majority had not behaved…
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