"Educated", by Tara Westover, was one of the breakthrough books of 2018. It graced every "Best Books of 2018" list imaginable, sat on the NY Times Bestseller list for 50 weeks, and was favored by many great people, including Barack Obama and Bill Gates.
"Educated" is a memoir written by Idahoan Tara Westover. Tara was born into a Mormon survivalist family on an isolated mountain in Idaho called Buck's Peak. Her father refused to enroll his children in a public school for fear of brainwashing. Tara grew up never attending school and she was never even registered for a birth certificate, so her exact birth date is also unknown. She also never went to the doctor, and according to the state of Idaho, they didn't know she even existed until she was 9 years of age.
Educated by Tara Westover: The #1 New York Times Bestselling Memoirwww.youtube.com
Tara received some education when her mom homeschooled her, but at some point, this stopped because her father and her brothers required help in the scrap metal junkyard. When she wasn't working in the junkyard, she was helping her mom mix essential oils and deliver babies as a midwife's assistant.
Tara was the youngest of seven children, five of them being boys. She was most influenced by two of her brothers, Shawn and Tyler, in very different ways. Growing up, Tara had a complicated relationship with her brother Shawn. She was consistently trying to live up to his standards, to be a good sister, but often he would go off like a switch and physically abuse her by putting her head down the toilet and pulling her hair tightly by the scalp.
Tyler, on the other hand, left Buck's Peak to pursue a college degree, much to his father's protests. When Tara was 17, it was her brother Tyler who urged her to take the ACT and pursue a quality education. Despite her dad's protests, Tara drove forty miles to the closest bookstore to buy an ACT prep book. Tara taught herself algebra and grammar by waking up every morning at 6 a.m. before going to work at her multiple jobs.
On her second try, Tara passed the ACT, then applied to and got accepted to Brigham Young University. Tara left the comfort of her mountain and thrust herself into a big city. She didn't know that you were allowed to talk to professors, nor did she know that you had to read the textbook. She learned about things that she was never taught in her home, like the Civil Rights movement, slavery, and the Civil War. She didn't even know what the Holocaust was.
It wasn't long before Tara became enraptured with education and learning. She excelled in all of her classes and with the help of one of her professors. She studied abroad at Cambridge for a time, where one of the faculty saw how intelligent Tara was. He urged her to apply for the Gates Scholarship, and with his stellar recommendation, Tara won a free ride to earn an MPhil at Trinity College, Cambridge University. She would then go on to be a Harvard fellow and return to Cambridge to receive her Ph.D.
Reading "Educated" as a college student solidified my passion for education and taught me the lesson that where you come from does not have to determine who you are and what you do for the rest of your life. It taught me that to be educated is always a good thing, and though it may be hard to remove yourself from what you've known your whole life, it is ideal to always put yourself first.
That night I called on her and she didn't answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. 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.
