Educated; A Memoir, Tara Westover (has anyone read)

18 Feb 2018

[rey]

Has anyone read this book? It is about a woman raised out of school by survivalists who eventually earns a Phd. from Cambridge.

It sounds like a variant of Hillbilly Elegy.

[Manly Warrior]

You may be surprised to learn of how well non-traditional students overall and through life....

Here is a snapshot of Homeschoolers.

https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/

Note that the information is extracted from various public and private courses, so for actual numbers etc, you should dig into the cited sources.

[rey]

I would not be surprised at all. I think highly of home schooling.

I don’t think this memoir is advocating home schooling and the person in question was not really home schooled but simply removed from public school.

I was hoping to hear what a Freeper thought of it.

Here is one of the reviews on the amazon site:

“Educated” is a memoir about what it’s like to grow up as the youngest child of an off-the-grid Survivalist/Mormon family- Tara Westover’s early life was spent keeping up with her brothers, assisting her mom with mid-wifery and creating herbal remedies for others in their community, and doing incredibly dangerous work in her father’s scrapyard. Her father believed his children didn’t need an education because the world was on the brink of falling to pieces, and the only things his kids really needed to learn was how to can foods, prepare for the end times, aim and fire a gun, and defend their family’s belongings.

Despite her upbringing, Westover managed to become a PhD candidate at Cambridge- when she was a young teenager, she began working several jobs in a local town, and saving up for her independence from the abuse and violence she was experiencing at home. Without a single day of formal education, Westover educated herself using a test prep book she bought at a bookstore 40 miles away. From that very humble beginning (including no birth certificate and no one in her family knowing her birth date or even how old she was) she got into college, earned and maintained a scholarship, went to Cambridge on a distance learning program, and eventually went to the UK (and Harvard) for her graduate work.

This is an incredibly written book- only a skilled writer could take the experiences of such a horrifying childhood (basically a giant succession of one abusive experience after the other) and make it readable without being exploitative or too grim to handle. Literally every chapter in this book is an example of how Westover’s parents (or abusive older brother, Shawn) either neglected her, forced her to do dangerous things in the name of her father’s scrapyard business, or flat out physically or emotionally abused her. It’s shocking and there were a lot of times when I wanted to throw this book across the room out of anger, but I think a book like this is important to read because it not only highlights how there are likely children are out there like Westover, suffering under the guise of extreme “family values”, but it also is an example of how human beings can be resourceful and resilient, and break the cycle of abuse and ignorance.

The thing about this book that most resonated with me was not Westover’s unlikely educational path or her resilience, but the fact that she addresses a common issue that many adult children face: how to reconcile what it means to grow into a different person than who your parents would like you to be. My parents are saints compared to Westover’s, but when Westover began talking about what it meant to have to sacrifice her family’s desires for her (and ultimately a relationship with them) in order to honor a more meaningful life for herself, I identified with so much of what she had to share. It seems like more and more people are bringing this issue to light- while it’s incredibly heart breaking to have to “split” with your family over things like core values and beliefs (and emotional issues), reading Westover’s book helped me to feel much more at peace with my own ongoing experience.

So, all in all, Westover’s book is one abuse and heartbreak after another, but her courage and the quality of her writing more than make up for the difficult story she has to share. I can’t recommend this book enough.

[mschalock]

Thanks for posting. I placed a hold on the book at the library. Looking forward to reading it.