From the mountains of Idaho to the halls of Cambridge and Harvard—the gripping memoir of a girl who first set foot in a classroom at the age of seventeen, following an unconventional childhood isolated from mainstream society.
Title: Educated
Author: Tara Westover
Genre: Nonfiction (Memoir)
Originally published: 20 February 2018
Finished reading: 5 June 2020
Links: Get this book on Amazon
This is the best memoir you will ever read. Ever.
To be fair, I concede that I have not read all the memoirs out there—and therefore may not be ‘qualified’ to make the above statement. But that in no way changes the fact that you absolutely have to read this one, no matter what genre you usually pick up.
An improbable (and exceptional) story
Tara’s story is striking first of all because of its improbability. Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, she prepared for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches. In the summer she stewed herbs for her mother, a midwife and healer, and in the winter she salvaged in her father’s junkyard.
Severe injuries including burns and concussions were treated at home; her father forbade hospitals. So far removed was the family from mainstream society that none of the children received an education and one of Tara’s brother’s violent temperament raged on unchecked.
Yet, despite that being all she had known for seventeen years, Tara made the disorienting leap from Buck’s Peak to a classroom in Brigham Young University—the first one she ever set foot in. Her ceaseless pursuit of knowledge would bring her across continents, to Cambridge and to Harvard, eventually earning her a PhD.
It is utterly disorienting—and beautifully insane. Tara was not homeschooled and had not even been exposed to books, other than the Mormon religious texts her father extolled. And yet, she was able to overcome all that—all the social, intellectual and psychological barriers—to think on her own terms.
A broken childhood
Tara’s years in the mountains are likely unimaginable to most of us. Her childhood was not an idyllic one free from the stresses of formal schooling; she was forced into hard physical labour—without proper protection—from a young age, repeatedly abused by an older brother, and grew up listening to her father’s lectures and fundamentalist Mormon beliefs as if they were fact.
In Educated, Tara’s words betray no hint of self-pity, nor any vestige of resentment. It is this acceptance of suffering in spite of her circumstances—a strange coalescence of forgiveness and resilience—that I find most admirable.
She does not victimise herself. I respect her for that, and I love the way she brings us into her world.
The forces that shape our beliefs
We are made by our environment and our upbringing. We can break out of those confinements—much as Tara did—but some part of who we are will always be inextricably linked to the cumulation of all our past experiences.
It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.
As Tara stepped into the world beyond Buck’s Peak, she grappled with two clashing truths, so distinctly at odds they were almost always irreconcilable.
It was the pitting of commonly accepted societal views—a concerned roommate urging her to see a doctor, a kindly bishop imploring her to apply for a study grant—against her father’s long-standing beliefs, all of which had since become her own.
Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind.
Seeking knowledge and exposing herself to different perspectives set Tara on her journey of self-discovery. It was a wrenching process. None of us can lightly renounce beliefs that are the very constructs of our whole identity.
Even thousands of miles away from her former life, Tara still found herself unable to let go of her love and loyalty to her family.
Her experience is an extreme version of something everyone goes through with their parents. At some point in your childhood, you go from thinking they know everything to seeing them as adults with limitations.
What is an ‘education’?
In the quest for universal education, immortalised in the UN Millennium Development Goals, we have herded students into classrooms, batch upon batch, year after year. Over the years, enhancements have been made—the integration of technology into the classroom, talks of overhauling standardised testing—yet the fundamental model remains largely unchanged. It is still a system of education catering to the masses.
My parents would say to me all the time: you can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you. Which I really think is true. … I do think that we take people’s ability to self-teach away by creating this idea that that someone else has to do this for you, that you have to take a course, you have to do it in some formal way.
Tara’s story is a testament to the fact that a formal education is not necessary for one to realise one’s potential. Of the seven Westover siblings, three left home for college, and all earned PhDs.
Our current education system undoubtedly has its benefits. It is arguably the only way forward on the road to achieving universal education. Yet perhaps we, the beneficiaries of this prevailing system, should adopt the mentality that we can learn anything.
Educated is a brilliant fusion of familial ties, coming-of-age, the quest for knowledge, and the defining of one’s own identity. It is truly a one-of-a-kind memoir—an absolute must-read.
My favourite quotes from this book
(All quotes are arranged in chronological order as they appear in the book, with the chapters indicated in parentheses.)
I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.
― Tara Westover, Educated (Chapter 20: Recitals of the Fathers)
To admit uncertainty is to admit to weakness, to powerlessness, and to believe in yourself despite both. It is a frailty, but in this frailty there is a strength: the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.
― Tara Westover, Educated (Chapter 22: What We Whispered and What We Screamed)
Not knowing for certain, but refusing to give way to those who claim certainty, was a privilege I had never allowed myself. My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.
― Tara Westover, Educated (Chapter 22: What We Whispered and What We Screamed)
It’s strange how you give the people you love so much power over you.
― Tara Westover, Educated (Chapter 23: I’m from Idaho)
“I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head.”
― Tara Westover, Educated (Chapter 28: Pygmalion)
“You are not fool’s gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were.”
― Tara Westover, Educated (Chapter 28: Pygmalion)
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
― Tara Westover, Educated (Chapter 36: Four Long Arms, Whirling)
Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind.
― Tara Westover, Educated (Chapter 36: Four Long Arms, Whirling)
I shed my guilt when I accepted my decision on its own terms, without endlessly prosecuting old grievances, without weighing his sins against mine. Without thinking of my father at all. I learned to accept my decision for my own sake, because of me, not because of him. Because I needed it, not because he deserved it.
― Tara Westover, Educated (Chapter 40: Educated)
The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.
You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.
I call it an education.
― Tara Westover, Educated (Chapter 40: Educated)