Educated: Chapter 28 Summary & Analysis

Tara arrives in England at King’s College, Cambridge and is positively overwhelmed by its grandeur. She has a room of her own there and eats breakfast each morning in a great Gothic hall. She feels out of place, though, whenever she spends time with her privileged BYU classmates, who have all bought new sophisticated clothes for the trip across the pond.

On a tour of the campus chapel, Tara and her classmates go up onto the roof. Though the wind blows hard and strong, Dr. Kerry observes that Tara is “not afraid of falling”—she stands tall against the wind while all her other classmates hunch and cling to the walls. Dr. Kerry observes that it as if Tara has been up on this roof “all [her] life.” Tara responds coolly that she’s “just standing”—only in crouching and hunching and refusing to control their panic do her classmates acknowledge the wind’s power to knock them down.

Tara’s first week at Cambridge passes in a blur of lectures and meals. She is assigned a supervisor, a professor who will oversee her work during the program—her supervisor is Professor Jonathan Steinberg, a scholar renowned for his writings on the Holocaust. At her first meeting with Professor Steinberg, as tells the man about her educational and personal background, and he is stunned. He sees Tara’s story as “marvelous,” and remarks that he feels “as if [he’s] stepped into Shaw’s Pygmalion.”

Professor Steinberg takes a special interest in Tara, poring meticulously over her papers and helping her to understand that every word and punctuation mark says something and is important. At Cambridge, reading intensely each day, Tara is learning how to see books differently than how she was raised to. Her father saw books as objects of “fear or adoration,” but Tara realizes now that they don’t have to be either. Steinberg is deeply impressed by Tara’s work, and tells her she’s one of the best students he’s ever had. She is unprepared for such praise, knowing how to handle “cruelty better than kindness.” Steinberg encourages her to apply to graduate school at Cambridge or Harvard, and tells her not to worry about the fees—he will ensure that she is taken care of.

On her last night at Cambridge, there is a grand formal dinner, but all Tara wants is to be alone in her room. She leaves as soon as she can, but Dr. Kerry follows her out of the dining hall and asks her to take a walk with him. He tells her that it’s time to realize she has “as much right to be here as anyone,” and that she must always take pride and ownership in the person and the scholar she’s making herself into. Tara wants badly to believe Dr. Kerry—but can’t stop thinking of the lonely, beaten girl in the parking lot of Stokes and the bathroom mirror of her childhood home. Before heading back into the dining hall, Dr. Kerry urges Tara to think of the story of Pygmalion. As soon as Eliza Doolittle believed in herself, he says, “it didn’t matter what dress she wore.”