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The story of Ben Carson…
Benjamin Solomon Carson was born in Detroit, Michigan. His mother, Sonya Carson, one of 24 children, had dropped out of school in the third grade. She later married Robert Solomon Carson, a much older Baptist minister from Tennessee, when she was only thirteen.

As a result of having only a third grade education, Sonya Carson never learned how to read and could not help Ben and his older brother, Curtis, with their schoolwork. When Carson was only eight, his parents divorced, and Mrs. Carson was left to raise Benjamin and Curtis on her own. She worked at two, sometimes three, jobs at a time to provide for her boys.

Later, Ben Carson experienced difficulty in school, eventually falling to the bottom of his class. He became the object of name-calling and subsequently developed a violent, uncontrollable temper.

Determined to turn her son's life around, Carson's mother limited his television-watching and refused to let him go outside to play until he had finished his homework each day. She required him to read two library books a week and to give her written reports on his reading, even though, with her own poor education, she could barely read what he had written. Carson soon amazed his instructors and classmates with his improvement.

"It was at that moment that I realized I wasn't stupid," he recalled later. Carson continued to amaze his classmates with his new-found knowledge and within a year he was at the top of his class.

After determining that he wanted to be a psychiatrist, Carson graduated with honors from high school and attended Yale University, where he earned a degree in Psychology. From Yale, he went to the Medical School of the University of Michigan, where his interest shifted from psychiatry to neurosurgery.

His excellent hand-eye coordination and three-dimensional reasoning skills made him a superior surgeon. After medical school, he became a neurosurgery resident at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. At the age of 33, he became director of Pediatric Neurosurgery

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