Dr. Ben Carson, the renowned surgeon and former U.S. secretary of Housing and Urban Development, stressed the transformative power of reading during a roundtable discussion with community leaders on April 16 at Shepherd Community Center.
Carson knows that power firsthand.
During an episode of Shepherd’s “Breaking the Cycle of Poverty” podcast, Carson noted that he struggled as a young student growing up in Detroit, but with his mother’s encouragement, he became an avid reader.
Carson earned a scholarship to Yale University, was accepted to medical school where he trained as a surgeon, and eventually became the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins.
Inspired by a love for reading, Carson and his wife Candy launched the Ben Carson Reading Project, which has opened 300 fully equipped reading rooms in schools across the United States.
“The fact that reading changed my life completely, we decided to start putting these rooms in … they’re places where no kid is going to pass it up because the way that they’re decorated,” Carson told The Indianapolis Recorder. “In many cases, they get points for the books they read, which they can trade in for prizes, which attracts them in the beginning, but after they learn how to read, they just enjoy the reading itself, and usually their grades improve tremendously as they become readers.”
In addition to meeting with students and recording a podcast episode during his visit to Shepherd, Carson also engaged with community leaders at the roundtable, which was moderated by Indianapolis City-County Council President Vop Osili.
“I’ve seen a lot of schools that cater to the people who come from the Title I type neighborhood, where the emphasis has truly been on education, not on social issues — which I think are better handled at home and through the church — and let the school really concentrate on making that person a viable candidate for anything,” Carson said during the roundtable.
Carson’s investment in education extends to creation of the Carson Scholars Fund in 1994. The fund has awarded more than 12,000 scholarships to students since it was founded.
“These young people have a 98% four-year college graduation rate. That is by leaps and bounds higher than the national average. Even among our best universities, no one is finishing four years 98% of the time,” Cordell Carter, CEO of the Carson Scholars Fund, told The Recorder. “Well, what if that number was 25,000 and what if those kids were coming from Title I neighborhoods? I think we would see a massive positive change in this world, and that’s what we’re aiming to do, working right here in places like the Shepherd Center.”
