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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Educated, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, History, and Subjectivity
Learning and Education
Devoutness and Delusion
Family, Abuse, and Entrapment
Summary
Analysis
The young Tara Westover stands on an abandoned railway car in the yard next to her family’s barn. The strong wind whips her hair across her face as she looks down at the valley beyond her family’s farm. She looks up at the mountain looming nearby, Buck’s Peak, and is able to make out the “dark form of the Indian Princess.” Tara looks back at her family’s house on the hillside and can see movement inside. Her brothers are awake and moving about while her mother makes breakfast and her father gets dressed in his work gear for another day at the scrap yard. Tara watches as, on the highway below, a school bus “rolls past without stopping.” At only seven years old, Tara understands that her family is “different” from other families: she and her siblings “don’t go to school.”
The book’s first passage establishes many things, both logistically and thematically. It shows that the details of Tara Westover’s childhood are still deeply alive and resonant in her mind, tying into the book’s primary theme of memory, and also suggests that Tara and her family have a language, a lore, and a logic all their own.
Themes
Tara’s dad is often worried that the government will force the children to go to school, and has ensured that four of his seven children don’t have birth certificates, medical records, or school records. Tara and more than half of her siblings were born at home and have never been to a doctor or received immunizations: “According to the state of Idaho and the federal government, [Tara does] not exist.”
It’s startling to see the adult Tara outline the facts of her childhood so plainly in this passage—and to admit so casually that her personhood has been denied to her because of her father’s warped doctrine.
Themes
Tara and her siblings have grown up “preparing for the Days of Abomination”—stocking supplies, bottling peaches, and getting ready for the “World of Men” to fail. Tara has no formal education, but is “educated in the rhythms of the mountain” and the natural world of their rural Idaho county. She has been raised on her father’s stories about the peak, and the Indian Princess atop it, who emerges each year when the snows start to melt and the buffalo return to the valley. According to Dad, the Indian Princess is an ancient Indian signal foretelling the arrival of spring, and the time for all of nature to “come home” to the valley.
In this passage, Tara Westover complicates the idea of what it means to be educated. As the title suggests, this idea is the central thread that runs throughout the memoir. She and her siblings are not educated in any traditional sense—but they know things foreign to their peers and classmates, and are aware of the rhythms of nature in a way that is unique and even beautiful.
Themes
Now, as an adult looking back on her childhood, Tara realizes that all of her father’s stories were about the “jagged little patch of Idaho” where he’d chosen to raise his family. None of his stories prepared Tara to leave the mountain or “cross oceans and continents.” Without the mountain—and the princess—Tara has struggled all her adult life to “know when it [is] time to come home.”
This last passage of the prologue shows the adult Tara’s feelings of longing and ambivalence when it comes to the direction her life has taken. She is no longer tethered to her family or their strange way of life, and suggests that this is certainly for the better—but at the same time admits that there were things about her old life that she still misses.
Themes
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