A Future Educator’s Review of Tara Westover’s ‘Educated’

“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.”

“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.”

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover

During her time raised in the mountains of Idaho by a Mormon survivalist family, Tara Westover never attended school. The government, her father taught her, used schools to brainwash children, like the Medical Establishment undermined one’s trust in God for healing, leading the family to treat brain damage and third degree burns at home. Besides, when the End of Days arrived, they would need to be self-sufficient. As a result of this reality, Tara spent her time storing canned peaches and gas, sleeping next to a duffel prepared for a quick escape into the mountains, assisting her mother, a midwife who relies on herbs and oils for healing, and scrapping in her father’s junkyard.

One of seven children, she watched as her older brother Tyler studied independently and left for college. At home, another older brother became regularly violent towards her. Tyler returned during one such event and convinced Tara to study independently, leading her to pass the ACT and escape the mountain to Brigham Young University. Years later, she entered Harvard and Cambridge, where she earned her PhD in intellectual history and political thought.

Tara’s story focuses on how education opens up new perspectives. She learned to understand her father, although functioning, may be driven by a mental illness, to recognize the dehumanizing nature of that slur her brother refers to her by, to realize her desire to learn does not conflict with womanhood. New words like “Holocaust” and “Civil Rights Movement” drew her towards the study of historians, as she then tried to understand how those who construct history handle a sudden realization of how little they knew before. Alongside, Tara had to come to the understanding that she, too, has a place in the halls of a school.

Even while writing her dissertation, Tara faced the fact that receiving an education and speaking out about her brother’s violence estranged her from the family she loves, who to this day claim she spreads lies, possessed by the Devil. To be accepted into her home once again, Tara would have to give up everything she’s worked so hard to learn, every new perspective not in line with theirs.

I wondered at Tara’s dedication to uncovering new knowledge. Her ACT study remained largely independent, often marked by hours spent in front a text she was determined to decode. Her professors noted the fresh caliber of her essays as she read and wrote about authors like Wollstonecraft for the first time. I wonder about how to encourage my future students to study so vehemently, to encounter each page with new curiosity and personal reflection, and to write on what they discover with sincerity rather than a determination to get the grade and move on unaffected. I wonder how to more often bring that mindset out in myself.

Those without an education often seem to be the ones most willing to risk their lives for it. Those with education provided in abundance seem to either feel the pressure of performing successfully for the sake of a number or not care at all. Some simply have other concerns: family, finances, expected futures. How to make those with access care, really care, about the content and see how it can enrich their lives? My only answer currently, one I feel Tara would share, is to pass down an enthusiasm for knowledge, to become a facilitator and allow students to discover the world for their own sake.

While Educated could serve well in a literature circle, as independent reading, or for a unit on memoir, I recommend educators take the time to experience Tara’s story for themselves. Professors had some of the deepest impacts on her personal and academic growth, and we have the opportunity to do the same for our students, to help them find their voices when others strive to silence them.

“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. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.”

Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover