Liberation, By The Book

This may be of interest to those modern or post-modern educationists who discount the value of books.

Two fatherless boys from Detroit’s black ghetto were growing up in the 1960s, both failing the undemanding standards of their local school. Their mother, Sonya, was a domestic, cleaning three middle-class houses to provide for her children. Their only recreation at home was television.

One recalled: “Mother noticed something in the suburban houses she cleaned — books.”

One day she turned off the television and told the boys, despite their emphatic protests, that they were to write two book reports for her each week. She took them to the public library until they no longer needed anyone to make them go, insisting, until no insistence was necessary, that they write the reports which she, then, as they later discovered, an illiterate, could only pretend to read.

One of those boys, Curtis Carson, became an aeronautical engineer. The other, Ben Carson, became chief of pediatric neurosurgery at John Hopkins Centre in Baltimore, one of the most senior positions of its kind in the world, and is now being canvassed as a potential Republican candidate for the presidency. The video below helps to explain why:

More on Sonya Carson here.