Learning and Education Theme Analysis

Growing up the child of a Mormon fundamentalist with paranoid, extremist views—possibly exacerbated by bipolar disorder—Tara Westover was denied access to an education. Her father, Gene, believed that the American government used public schools to deliberately “brainwash” children, and refused to let his younger children attend school. Instead of receiving a formal education, Tara grew up studying the Bible, helping her mother mix and bless homemade herbal tinctures, and working alongside her older brothers in her father’s scrap yard. As Westover retroactively examines her childhood and her burgeoning desire for a traditional education—and her uneasy but enthusiastic transition into the world of knowledge and academia—she explores what it means to be educated, ultimately arguing that education doesn’t amounts to the books a person reads or the facts they memorize in school. Instead, education is a life-long process that encompasses how a person responds to the world around them, making decisions and changes—often painful ones—along the way.

The young Tara, deprived of traditional education, yearns for the normalcy and achievable goals that schooling provides. As she rebels against her parents’ disdainful and paranoid view of all educational institutions and seeks admission to college, though, Tara begins to learn that her education has been compromised more heavily than she previously realized. Tara has more to learn about the world than history and arithmetic—and as she spreads her wings and hungrily pursues higher and higher learning, she comes to see that though her education has been anything but traditional, she has been selling herself short all along by claiming to be uneducated. In fact, Tara has been educated in ways that many people never will be—the lessons she’s learned throughout her difficult adolescence about abuse, manipulation, and isolation and haven’t been pleasant, but have made her into the person she is and have prepared her to understand education as a journey rather than a destination. In spite of her parents’ insistence that public schools were “brainwashing” factories that turned innocent children into “socialists” and “gentiles,” Tara longed to be traditionally educated. She always knew she didn’t belong in her father’s scrap yard, and found herself drawn to books and reading despite the shortage of literature, textbooks, or learning materials in the household. Tara taught herself critical thinking and writing by studying the Book of Mormon and writings and journals of the early Mormon prophets, which were often composed in dense, nineteenth-century language. Tara spent hours poring over the pages, desperate to understand, to process, and to respond to the work of others. Looking back on her early attempts at self-directed learning from adulthood, she sees that the true education of her youth—“the one that would matter”—were the hours she spent developing “the patience to read things [she] could not yet understand.” The early days of Tara’s attempts at securing an education for herself were steeped in shame, secrecy, and self-reliance. Because her family saw all forms of traditional, secular education as tools of an evil and far-reaching conspiracy to “brainwash” the youth of the world, Tara was forced to hone the mechanics of academic and literary thought on her own, with essentially no roadmap. Her older brothers who broke with tradition and pursued education paved the way for her, but as a girl, things were different for Tara—and the pursuit of an education was, for her, not just frowned upon, but even dangerous, drawing the ire of her mother, father, and contemptuous older brother Shawn.

In the latter half of the book, which details Tara’s admittance to Brigham Young University and the start of her studies there, she comes to develop a more comprehensive view of what education is. When Tara starts class, she finds that she has never heard of major foundational aspects of world history, art, and culture, and as she asks for answers to basic questions, her classmates and teachers are often offended by her lack of knowledge. So many people around her fail to understand just how isolated and prescriptive Tara’s life has been, and can’t imagine not knowing what the Holocaust is—or the basics of roommate etiquette and personal hygiene such as regular hand-washing. As the overwhelmed Tara navigates the new terrain of independence, she sees that her education is lacking not only in book-smarts, but in the rules and regulations by which others move through the world. Tara has help along the way—though she gets off to a rocky start in some of her classes and friendships, she eventually finds roommates, boyfriends, and professors who understand that the large gaps in Tara’s academic and social education alike aren’t her fault at all. These friends—her roommate Robin, her teachers Dr. Kerry and Professor Steinberg, and her boyfriends at BYU and Cambridge, Nick and Drew—help Tara to accept that her education in the ways of the world will always be one that is in-progress and ever-changing. With the support networks she finds at Cambridge and BYU, Tara is able to stop seeing her past as shameful and understand the gravity of what she’s done for herself, her education, and her future in getting out of Idaho. Even in moments of profound doubt and fear, Tara slowly gains the tools to understand that her education has been her ability to distance herself from her abusive family, assert her desires and her needs, and begin to discern the difference between right and wrong, and fact and fiction. As a girl, Tara dreamed of education as the chance to sit in a classroom and study—as a woman, she understands that an education is much more broad, complex, and constantly evolving.

The memoir’s title, Educated, trickily implies that one can ever be “educated” completely or linearly. As the book progresses, Westover shows what a fallacy this idea in fact is. Her own education is a work-in-progress, a series of transformations that both pain and uplift her as she works her way through the world. Her education has entailed learning about art, history, and culture—all of the things that compromise traditional schooling—but its most important components have been rooted in learning about herself. As a girl, Tara dreamed of education as the chance to sit in a classroom and study—as a woman, she reveals that an education is much more broad and complex than academia, and that pursuing this kind of multi-faceted education is a life-long endeavor.