If you have not yet heard about Tara Westover’s Educated: A Memoir, I wager that you will soon. And if you have not yet read the book, I expect that you probably will. This is a book that will be assigned, taught, and taught again and again for many years to come. It is that good and that relevant. Westover’s story, her struggle and her accomplishments, resonate.
Westover was raised off the grid in rural Idaho, the youngest of seven children. Her religious parents and increasingly paranoid father kept her out of school and indoctrinated in a lifestyle that many of us would associate with another country or another century. She worked and helped her family. That was her job. She had minimal contact with formal education or books. Westover never had a birth certificate, immunizations, or exposure to much of modern American life. As a teenager, she taught herself algebra to take the ACT. Older siblings had left the mountain and she knew that there were possibilities for her. In an act of courage, she enrolled at BYU. That was a key step in a journey that eventually took her to Cambridge University, to Harvard, and to a PhD in history at Cambridge. The book chronicles her “formal” education and the much more difficult, tangled education as she established her own identity as a woman, an independent adult, and a citizen of the “modern” world.
Extraordinarily smart and observant, Westover writes beautifully. She’s unsparing in her criticisms and relentless in her courage – in actions and insights.
Westover’s story resonates and connects in many ways to many issues and concerns we are wrestling with as a society. She struggled for agency and safety in a misogynistic and violent home, as so do many so many other women. She internalized messages of poor self-worth, of limited agency, and of value through obedience – all of which she had to struggled through in her “education.” It is a story about actualization and what it means to be an independent – and caring, connected – human.
On a personal note, it was stirring to read Westover’s thoughts about Cambridge University. I earned my PhD there also I had recognized the sense of wonder, the questioning of belonging, and the tremendous power of the institution to give its students a sense of intellectual worth and more. Westover’s graduate education was spurred by Cambridge University Professor Jonathan Steinberg. A superb historian of the Holocaust, Steinberg is an inspirational teacher – the kind of professor that deeply cares about students. It is easy to imagine how Steinberg’s curiosity, compassion and enthusiasm would make such a difference to Westover. I have spent time in his office and I remember conversations with him vividly. Steinberg does that to students. He is special and very much appreciated.
It is not fair to burden Westover with global issues. Nonetheless, I expect that as more people read Educated, expectations for the book, and its author, will expand. What does it take for someone to be “educated” and what are society’s obligations to those that lack an education? Is this a question for modern America or the rest of the world? How do we think through the issues of education and class, gender and race?
What Westover has done Educated is given voice to those denied an education – and that is an extraordinarily powerful thing to do.
David Potash