Educated: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

On New Year’s Day, Mother drives Tara to her new life in Utah. Tara’s apartment is a mile south of campus, and when she arrives, she finds that her two roommates have not yet returned from the Christmas holiday. Mother hugs Tara goodbye briskly and drops her off, leaving Tara alone. None of her roommates return for three days, and Tara is disturbed and quiet by the silence of the apartment compared to the constant hum of her childhood home, as well as the noises of the college town just beyond her windows.

When Tara’s first roommate, Shannon, arrives back at the apartment, Tara is shocked by the girl’s “gentile” appearance. Shannon studies at a nearby cosmetology school and dresses in tight white tank tops and pink velour sweatpants. When Sharon invites Tara to come to church with her the next day, Tara is horrified that in Utah, gentiles are allowed in the churches—she worries that everyone else at BYU is a gentile, too. When Tara’s second roommate Mary arrives, she’s briefly comforted by Mary’s floor-length skirt and conservative demeanor—but when Mary heads out grocery shopping on a Sunday, the Sabbath, Tara is again upset, lost, and confused.

The next day is Tara’s first day of class, and she has a hard time finding her way around campus and getting to the right classes. As the week progresses, she manages to get to the right classrooms, but even in her first-year lectures and seminars, she feels behind—professors make mention of things like the “essay form,” which all of her other classmates have learned in high school but are foreign to Tara. In her second American History class, Tara fails a pop quiz. Rather than feeling resentful of her family for denying her an education, she begins to wonder if she has made a mistake—perhaps “homeschooling [is] a commandment from the Lord” after all.

Later in the week, Tara makes a friend in her Western civilization class named Vanessa. Tara is beginning to feel comfortable in class when one day, she raises her hand to ask about a word in the textbook she’s never seen before. After she asks the meaning of the word, the atmosphere in the classroom goes tense, and the professor refuses to answer her question. When the bell rings, Vanessa reprimands Tara for “making fun” of something serious and storms off. Baffled, Tara heads off to the computer lab to look up the word that is giving her trouble: it is “Holocaust.” At the next lecture, Tara apologizes to Vanessa—but doesn’t explain why she didn’t know the word—and decides that she will not raise her hand for the rest of the semester.

That weekend, on Saturday evening, Tara works hard at her homework. When the clock strikes midnight, Tara worries that she should stop, as it is now officially the Sabbath—but she tells herself that the day of rest doesn’t start until she wakes up. She works through the night, and in the morning goes to church with her roommates. As the girls mingle with their friends at church and make plans for the rest of the afternoon, Tara refuses to join them—Shannon explains that Tara is “very devout.” Tara considers how, in childhood, Dad always proclaimed that their family were the only “real” Mormons, and everyone else was merely a gentile. Tara is frightened that by living with and befriending gentiles, she is going to become one.