Educated by
Tara Westover
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
“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.”
"Educated" traces Tara Westover’s struggle to get an education despite a domineering, radical father who mainly wanted his family to work in his junkyard and obediently listen to rants about the government and religion. She and her siblings were supposedly being homeschooled, but her father thwarted that so often that by the time she was 8 her daily routine included no schooling at all. Any learning after that was self-directed, she wrote: “You could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done.”
Her mother tried to teach them for a time, but eventually accepted her father’s way of looking at education. “All that really matters … is that you kids learn to read. That other twaddle is just brainwashing,” she told Tara.
It’s an amazing story, and beautifully written. The journey from the enclosed bubble she lived in with her parents to the foreign world of college was akin to being dropped on another planet and trying to make her way – so alien as to be almost incomprehensible. Learning expands your mind and your horizons, but it isn’t always painless.
