Carl Ransom Rogers was born on January 8th, 1902, in a small suburb of Chicago called Oak Park, Illinois; the fourth of six children born to Walter A. Rogers and Julia M. Cushing. Walter Rogers was a successful civil engineer, and Julia Cushing was a homemaker and devout Pentecostal Christian. As strict Protestant parents, they worked hard to prevent society from corrupting their children.
Carl didn’t feel close to his father, who spent a lot of time away from home on business trips. On one occasion, when Carl was in eighth grade, his father invited him on one of these trips as a way to introduce him to the practical work world of construction and engineering business. It allowed him and his father to spend time together, but it didn’t succeed …show more content…
Shortly after marrying, the two of them moved to New York City together. In September of 1924, Rogers changed his major to religion and enrolled in the Union Theological Seminary, much to the dismay of his conservative Protestant father. While attending the Union Theological Seminary, he took a student organized seminar entitled “Why am I entering the ministry?” This class was created by students who petitioned to have a class without an instructor, arguing that by following the instructor they had to accept his ideas as the correct theories during classes. These students – Roger’s fellow classmates – wanted to have the chance to explore each other’s perspectives without having to accept any one perspective as necessarily correct; they desired to conduct a class in which other ways of thinking could be suggested and discussed freely. Through participating in this seminar, Rogers was able to contemplate his decision to enter the ministry. After much thought, Rogers came to the conclusion that becoming a minister would entail assuming a fixed belief system; this was exactly what he had tried to leave behind after having lived under his parents’ fixed mindset back in Illinois. He decided that it would be best to switch his major. But to which major did he switch? The field of clinical psychology during the 1920s proved to be very attractive to the “lapsed social-gospel seminarian”, satisfying him by providing a balance between moral purpose and intellectual
Carl didn’t feel close to his father, who spent a lot of time away from home on business trips. On one occasion, when Carl was in eighth grade, his father invited him on one of these trips as a way to introduce him to the practical work world of construction and engineering business. It allowed him and his father to spend time together, but it didn’t succeed …show more content…
Shortly after marrying, the two of them moved to New York City together. In September of 1924, Rogers changed his major to religion and enrolled in the Union Theological Seminary, much to the dismay of his conservative Protestant father. While attending the Union Theological Seminary, he took a student organized seminar entitled “Why am I entering the ministry?” This class was created by students who petitioned to have a class without an instructor, arguing that by following the instructor they had to accept his ideas as the correct theories during classes. These students – Roger’s fellow classmates – wanted to have the chance to explore each other’s perspectives without having to accept any one perspective as necessarily correct; they desired to conduct a class in which other ways of thinking could be suggested and discussed freely. Through participating in this seminar, Rogers was able to contemplate his decision to enter the ministry. After much thought, Rogers came to the conclusion that becoming a minister would entail assuming a fixed belief system; this was exactly what he had tried to leave behind after having lived under his parents’ fixed mindset back in Illinois. He decided that it would be best to switch his major. But to which major did he switch? The field of clinical psychology during the 1920s proved to be very attractive to the “lapsed social-gospel seminarian”, satisfying him by providing a balance between moral purpose and intellectual