Educated by Tara Westover

For my first book review, I am reviewing a book which I found to be so powerful and thought provoking. This is a book which I would highly recommend and would give it a very high rating.

Published in 2018 by Random House Books

Synopsis: Educated is a memoir about Tara Westover who grew up in the mountains of Idaho. Her father Gene owns a scrapyard that scraps for metals. Her mother Faye is a midwife and herbal specialist. She has six siblings: Tyler, Shawn, Richard, Luke, Audrey, and Tony.

Although her father encouraged Tara and her siblings to learn, he did not believe in the public education system or doctors. Therefore, Tara was homeschooled until the age of seventeen when she entered college. Her brother Tyler is the first of the seven siblings to enter college and encourages Tara to take the ACT and to leave home and go to college.

Her brother Richard also pursues higher education. Shawn, Audrey, and Luke choose to stay at home in Idaho. Shawn is physically, verbally and emotionally abusive towards Tara. Her grandmother, her father’s mother, encourages Tara to pursue a higher education and leave Idaho so that she can have a more normal life.

After Tara left her college, she estranged herself from the majority of her family however her Aunt Debbie embraced her and her brother Tyler openly and helps Tara to get her passport she can study abroad. Tara receives a B.A. at Brigham Young University as well as a Master’s in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge at Trinity College and a Doctorate in Intellectual History.

At the end of the book Tara returns to Idaho and is reunited with her brother Tyler and his wife as well as two of her aunts and her siblings. She is only in contact with a few of her family members.

My review:

After reading Educated, I have several thoughts about this book. There are several themes I noticed while reading this book.

The first theme is the importance of education and the power of education to change one’s life and one’s circumstances.

“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”

My parents are both college educated, my mother with a Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree and my father with a Bachelor’s degree, and my sisters and I were raised with the knowledge that it was important to get an education in order to better ourselves and go to college. All of us have gone to college and pursued higher education.

Although that was something I appreciated and valued, until I read this book I never truly realized how grateful I am to have the upbringing I did. Tara realizes once she goes to college how limiting her circumstances truly were and how big the world is and the power of education.

Another theme is learning to live life on your own and develop your own views of life and your own voice instead of living the life someone else expects you to live.

“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.”

What I think this quote means is that what Tara realizes through her education is that she learns to develop her own truths and her own views of life and become her own person. This is very relatable and happens to all of us of as we grow and develop and become adults.

The final theme I noticed was the impact one’s family has on one’s upbringing.

“There was a pause, then more words appeared—words I hadn’t known I needed to hear, but once I saw them, I realized I’d been searching my whole life for them. You were my child. I should have protected you. I lived a lifetime in the moment I read those lines, a life that was not the one I had actually lived. I became a different person, who remembered a different childhood. I didn’t understand the magic of those words then, and I don’t understand it now. I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.”

Tara realizes after her education that as much as she loves her family and always will that she has to live life for herself and be her own person and not necessarily the person her family expects her to be.

This is also very relatable to me, and I had a wonderful upbringing with loving parents and have siblings whom I love dearly. My parents encouraged my siblings and I to become independent and develop our own thoughts and opinions and become our own people.

In summary, after reading this book, it helped me to realize and to fully appreciate the upbringing I had and the education I was privileged to receive. I want to end this review with a quote that I think sums up this whole book.

“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.” “You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. “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. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”

What this quote means is that Tara realizes that the person she ultimately becomes was always inside her and that education may change how she sees herself and how others see her, but that even if she goes home to Idaho she will still be the person she is and nothing can change that.

I think that is such a powerful realization to come by and helps Tara to become the fully confident formed adult she is.