Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover grew up in the mountains of Idaho, in a peaceful and undisturbed valley. The place is called Buck’s Peak. She is the youngest of a large family with seven children. She had been educated with the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. Her dad had some radical beliefs and because of this, all the family was isolated. Tara was not allowed to go to school or see a doctor if she was poorly. She could not go to the hospital even if she was suffering of a very bad injury. She did not have a birth certificate until she was nine years old. According to the federal government, she just did not exist.

This memoir tells about Tara’s parents : their way of life, their daily routine and their vision about education.  Her mother was an herbalist who became an unlicensed midwife for a hundred miles. Her dad thought his kids should learn more practical skills. He would constantly ask his children to help him in the junkyard.

Looking back at her childhood, Tara says page 46 how would she defines the concept of learning. “Learning in our family was entirely self-directed. You could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done. Some of us were more disciplined about others.” It was sort of based on individual responsibility. When Tara was young, she could feel that this land was a perfect place for imagination but as she got older, she wanted to enroll in a public school.

By the age of sixteen, she decided to educate herself. She bought some algebra books and just basically taught herself, starting a new path of education without knowing that this would take her to Cambridge but also away from her family. She did not know at the time that this would require a lot of her ideas to change.

The book is divided into 40 chapters and three different parts. Right from the beginning, the writer says: “This story is not about Mormonism”. It’s the first thing she writes. Maybe she was concerned how people would see her book but for me it was clear that her dad has some extreme ideas about religion. He is a complicated character.

This book makes you think about education and home schooling. When Tara was young, she did not have much access to different points of views or histories, she had never heard of holocaust or civil right movements. When she finally had access to different perspectives, she got the opportunity to be surrounded by people would have different opinions on specific topics.

At many occasions, I felt sorry and sad for Tara because in her house there was also violence and many incidences about child abuse. With her own family, I felt like nobody could really see what was going on because they were really isolated. Later on, when she confronted her parents about some traumatic memories, they chose not to believe her.

Tara Westover used to write a journal when she was a teenager. She kept many details and conversations and being able to go back to her past did help her in the writing process of her first book. I think her writing style is based on facts and anecodtes but through her decisions we understand her feelings. Certain footnotes have been included to give a voice to memories that differ from her.

I had the opportunity to read this book thanks to a friend of mine who comes to my book club. This is one of the great thing about joining a book club :  it makes me read novels or a certain type of literature I would probably not have chosen. So I’m glad I read Educated because this story is about a quest for knowledge and on the top of that I really enjoyed her choices for some chapters names.