Educated: A Memoir
I finished the book, Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover a couple of days ago, and have been processing about it ever since. I ended up reading it as I read The Handmaid's Tale nearly thirty years ago... in great big chunks because I just needed to be done, but didn't want to leave it unfinished. It was just too traumatic to take my time through it. This post is probably more of me trying to work out what I think about it, so I apologize if it meanders a bit.
Once again, I'm late to the party. The book was released in 2018, so while it is still relatively new, the hoopla surrounding it has died down a bit. If you know me, this shouldn't be a surprise, as I tend not to want read anything that is too popular at the moment; I'm just reactionary like that. With our library opening back up a couple of weeks ago, but inter-library loans still not an option, I needed some books I knew our library had, and I knew Educated was on the shelves.
I'm not quite sure what I was expecting. I knew the briefest outline, about a girl raised in unusual circumstances, who then manages to get herself to college and then to Cambridge. I'm pretty sure I was expecting a lot more about self-education and what not, especially given the title. Let's just say the book was not what I was expecting at all.
To read the blurbs on the book and some of the more sensationalistic press the book received, you would think that this was an expose on homeschooling, herbalism, survivalists, and Mormons. While those things play into the story, what the book is ultimately about is an abused child raised by mentally ill or brain-injured parents trying to come to terms with her past. The fact she left home and earned a PhD is window dressing. Educated is a survivor's tale of abuse and neglect; reading it is like watching a train wreck and not being able to turn away. Just the fact the book exists does leave the reader wondering exactly how much healing the author still has to do.
They say hard cases make bad law. Whenever I read anything involving homeschooling, especially something like this, I admit to being slightly on high alert. These are the sorts of things that people like to point to as to why homeschoolers should have more regulation. But even if homeschooling had more regulations than it did, it wouldn't have made a difference. The last four children in the family didn't even have birth certificates until much later in their lives. In the eyes of the state, they didn't even exist. Regulations cannot help with that. These parents were so fearful of government that it wouldn't have mattered what the laws said, they would have flown under the radar anyway.
It is difficult to make this a book about educational neglect. There are not many families with seven children who have three of them go on to earn PhD's, yet that is what Tara and two of her brothers did. It possibly raises questions about what is education and learning. Certainly there were areas of significant lack in the author's general knowledge, but once those areas were exposed, the author was able to mitigate them.
One thing I cannot help thinking is one of Malcolm Gladwell's theses... that some of the highest achievers have all overcome some significant pain and trauma in their lives. He makes a compelling case that the pain they experienced changed them in ways that enabled them to become the significant thinkers in their field. (I cannot remember which Gladwell book I read this in. Blink would be my first guess, but I don't own a copy to go look it up. Or maybe it was The Tipping Point or Outliers. It was most likely one of them. Read them all; they're equally interesting.) Seeing the author through Malcolm Gladwell's lens, it make one wonder whether Tara Westover would have accomplished what she did without her extremely challenging childhood.
That is not to excuse what the author experienced. I did some brief searching today, and I cannot find anywhere that the revelations in the book triggered any sort of investigation by child protective services. Given that the author's primary abuser had two children during the course of the book, I would hope so, but I couldn't find anything that would support that hope.
Finally, one of the biggest impressions that I am left with is personal. In the author's descriptions of her time studying with tutor at Cambridge, she describes walking into her first tutoring session and being asked what she would like to read, with her tutor being happy to support what her chosen area of interest was. She goes on to describe sessions where they discussed her work in depth, sometimes spending significant time over the placement of a comma in her writing. I will admit, these descriptions filled me with some fairly significant jealousy. This is how I would love to learn. Not jumping through hoops and checking off assignments on a syllabus, but significant study and learning in a field, on a topic that I was deeply interested in. Were I to go back in time and could do my college days all over again, I would make such very different choices; take advantage of different opportunities, but the more reasonable part of my brain reminds me that I am a much different person now than I was then.
My previous experiences made me who I am today, and if I were to go back and change that then I would not be the same person. The same is true for Tara Westover. Her childhood created who she was for better or for worse. She has achieved quite a bit since she was working in her father's scrap yard. I hope that she can ultimately come to terms with what she experienced; figuring out a way to balance the love she felt for her family and the betrayal and abuse that she endured at their hands.
Once again, I'm late to the party. The book was released in 2018, so while it is still relatively new, the hoopla surrounding it has died down a bit. If you know me, this shouldn't be a surprise, as I tend not to want read anything that is too popular at the moment; I'm just reactionary like that. With our library opening back up a couple of weeks ago, but inter-library loans still not an option, I needed some books I knew our library had, and I knew Educated was on the shelves.
I'm not quite sure what I was expecting. I knew the briefest outline, about a girl raised in unusual circumstances, who then manages to get herself to college and then to Cambridge. I'm pretty sure I was expecting a lot more about self-education and what not, especially given the title. Let's just say the book was not what I was expecting at all.
To read the blurbs on the book and some of the more sensationalistic press the book received, you would think that this was an expose on homeschooling, herbalism, survivalists, and Mormons. While those things play into the story, what the book is ultimately about is an abused child raised by mentally ill or brain-injured parents trying to come to terms with her past. The fact she left home and earned a PhD is window dressing. Educated is a survivor's tale of abuse and neglect; reading it is like watching a train wreck and not being able to turn away. Just the fact the book exists does leave the reader wondering exactly how much healing the author still has to do.
They say hard cases make bad law. Whenever I read anything involving homeschooling, especially something like this, I admit to being slightly on high alert. These are the sorts of things that people like to point to as to why homeschoolers should have more regulation. But even if homeschooling had more regulations than it did, it wouldn't have made a difference. The last four children in the family didn't even have birth certificates until much later in their lives. In the eyes of the state, they didn't even exist. Regulations cannot help with that. These parents were so fearful of government that it wouldn't have mattered what the laws said, they would have flown under the radar anyway.
It is difficult to make this a book about educational neglect. There are not many families with seven children who have three of them go on to earn PhD's, yet that is what Tara and two of her brothers did. It possibly raises questions about what is education and learning. Certainly there were areas of significant lack in the author's general knowledge, but once those areas were exposed, the author was able to mitigate them.
One thing I cannot help thinking is one of Malcolm Gladwell's theses... that some of the highest achievers have all overcome some significant pain and trauma in their lives. He makes a compelling case that the pain they experienced changed them in ways that enabled them to become the significant thinkers in their field. (I cannot remember which Gladwell book I read this in. Blink would be my first guess, but I don't own a copy to go look it up. Or maybe it was The Tipping Point or Outliers. It was most likely one of them. Read them all; they're equally interesting.) Seeing the author through Malcolm Gladwell's lens, it make one wonder whether Tara Westover would have accomplished what she did without her extremely challenging childhood.
That is not to excuse what the author experienced. I did some brief searching today, and I cannot find anywhere that the revelations in the book triggered any sort of investigation by child protective services. Given that the author's primary abuser had two children during the course of the book, I would hope so, but I couldn't find anything that would support that hope.
Finally, one of the biggest impressions that I am left with is personal. In the author's descriptions of her time studying with tutor at Cambridge, she describes walking into her first tutoring session and being asked what she would like to read, with her tutor being happy to support what her chosen area of interest was. She goes on to describe sessions where they discussed her work in depth, sometimes spending significant time over the placement of a comma in her writing. I will admit, these descriptions filled me with some fairly significant jealousy. This is how I would love to learn. Not jumping through hoops and checking off assignments on a syllabus, but significant study and learning in a field, on a topic that I was deeply interested in. Were I to go back in time and could do my college days all over again, I would make such very different choices; take advantage of different opportunities, but the more reasonable part of my brain reminds me that I am a much different person now than I was then.
My previous experiences made me who I am today, and if I were to go back and change that then I would not be the same person. The same is true for Tara Westover. Her childhood created who she was for better or for worse. She has achieved quite a bit since she was working in her father's scrap yard. I hope that she can ultimately come to terms with what she experienced; figuring out a way to balance the love she felt for her family and the betrayal and abuse that she endured at their hands.
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