3.15.1 Significance of The Aim in Teaching

The late Jacob Riis, noted author and lecturer, used to tell a very inspirational story on the force of having something to focus attention upon.

According to his story, certain men who lived just outside of Chicago, in its early history, had great difficulty walking to and from work during stormy weather, because of the almost impassably muddy conditions of the sidewalks.

After trudging through mud and slush for a long time, they conceived the idea of laying a plank walk through the worst sections. And so they laid two six-inch planks side by side. The scheme helped wonderfully, except on short winter days when the men had to go to work in the darkness of early morning and return in the darkness of evening.

It often was so dark that they would step off the planks, and once off they were about as muddy as if there had been no walk at all.

Finally someone suggested the idea that if a lantern were hung up at each end of the walk it would then be easy to fix the eye upon the lantern and keep on the walk. The suggestion was acted upon, and thereafter the light of the lantern did hold them to the plank. Jacob Riis argued that the lantern of an ideal held aloft would similarly hold young men in life’s path of righteousness.

A similar story is told of a farmer who experienced great difficulty in keeping a particular hen inside the run which he had built outside the hen house. He had put up a wire fence high enough, as he thought, to keep in the most ambitious chicken.

In fact, he argued that no hen could fly over it. One hen persisted in getting out regularly, though the farmer could never discover how she did it. Finally he decided to lay for her (she laid for him regularly).

To his great surprise, he watched her walk around the run carefully surveying it as she proceeded. At length she caught sight of a beam running along the top of the wire just above the gate. With her eye fixed upon it she made one mighty effort and was over.

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