Educated

What the book bears witness to

Tara Westover was born in 1986, the youngest of seven children, at the foot of a mountain in rural Idaho. Her father held deep suspicion of the government, schools and modern medicine, and prepared for the end of the world. The children did not go to school. Several, including Tara, had no birth certificate for years. Injuries, some severe, from work in her father’s scrapyard and from car accidents, were treated at home with her mother’s herbal remedies. Tara’s childhood was spent working in the scrapyard and helping her mother, a midwife and herbalist.

At seventeen, having taught herself enough mathematics and grammar to pass the college entrance exam, she was admitted to Brigham Young University. She had never been in a classroom. She went on to win a scholarship to the University of Cambridge, spent time at Harvard, and in 2014 received a doctorate in history from Cambridge. Educated, published in 2018, is her memoir of those years. It became one of the best-selling memoirs of its decade.

What it shows

The book shows ignorance from the inside. In one well-known scene, in an early university class, Westover asks what the word “Holocaust” means, not knowing. Her classmates think she is joking. She realises how much of the world’s history she has never heard of, and begins to understand that her picture of reality has been shaped by what she was never told.

It shows violence and its normalisation. One of her brothers abused her physically and psychologically over years, and her family, she writes, responded by denying it or blaming her. She describes how she herself, for years, rewrote her memories in her journal to fit the family’s version, doubting what she had seen.

It shows the slow work of building a mind. At university she had to learn facts, and also how to study, how to listen in class, how to accept that others knew things she did not. She describes the help of professors who saw her ability and insisted she could belong.

And it shows the cost. As she moved further into education, her relationship with her parents and several siblings broke down. They demanded that she accept their version of the past, including of her brother’s violence, as a condition of belonging. She refused, and lost them.

Westover is scrupulous about memory. Throughout the book, footnotes note where her siblings remember events differently, and she presents some scenes in more than one version. Some members of her family have publicly disputed parts of her account, and the book itself acknowledges that memory is fallible.

The questions it leaves

The book leaves the question of what education is. For Westover, it was not mainly the acquisition of knowledge or credentials. It was the development of a self that could look at her own past and judge it with her own mind. That is the sense of her title: being educated meant becoming able to think thoughts her family did not share.

It leaves the question of loyalty. She loved her family, and the book is not an attack on them. It asks what one owes to people one loves when they demand that one deny what one knows. There is no easy answer, and she does not offer one.

It also leaves open how much of her escape depended on her own effort, and how much on luck, an older brother who had left before her and urged her to go, and teachers who made exceptions. The story is extraordinary partly because so many people in similar circumstances do not get out.

What it changes in how you see others

The book changes how one sees people who hold beliefs that seem strange. Westover’s family were not stupid; they lived inside a closed world of information, enforced by love and fear. Seeing how she escaped helps explain how hard it is for others to do so.

It changes how one sees adult learners and people from unusual backgrounds. Westover’s ignorance in her first classes was not a lack of intelligence. Those who helped her were the ones who saw the difference.

And it changes how one hears accounts of the past that conflict. Her handling of memory, admitting where others disagree, shows a way to tell the truth as one sees it while respecting that others saw differently. The site’s idea page Cognitive Dissonance and Bad Faith explores how people defend beliefs against evidence, which is part of what her family did and what she had to overcome in herself.