Review: Educated

I read EDUCATED back in September after waiting for quite some time for it. It was definitely a hot topic book for the year and I’m so glad I finally read it! I think books like this and THE HILLBILLY ELEGY are really important. Living in one of the most liberal cities in America and growing up in a blue state, I’ve spent a lot of the last two years wondering how our country has gotten to the point it has; I would be one of those “coastal elites” the news likes to talk about. After reading both ELEGY and EDUCATED, I think I can understand a little more how the current administration came to power. 

Tara Westover never went to school. Her father believed that public education brainwashed children to suit the government agenda. I had different expectations for this book than it turned out to really be about. It had a slow start for me due to my expectations, but once I found my stride within it’s pages I couldn’t put it down. This is a book about challenging our upbringing and finding our own voice, even when it’s difficult. 

I think the moment that hit me the hardest was after Tara worked so hard to teach herself enough information to get the appropriate SAT scores to apply to Brigham Young University, she arrives to a complete culture shock. In the middle of a class she reads a word in a book that she has never seen or heard of, so she raises her hand to ask her professor. The professor is embarrassed and shocked, ignores the question, and continues his lesson amid the anger of the fellow students. The only friend Tara has tells her at the end of the lesson that she doesn’t want to work with her anymore and that she shouldn’t joke about such things. The word Tara didn’t know? Holocaust. 

She had grown up in a community that rewrote history in order to suit its needs.

Even though I was quite far into the memoir at this point, this is when everything really clicked for me. There are people in this country who do not know the real history of the world because they have been secluded in an area that has created its own facts to suit their agenda. I’m writing this review on Election Day 2018 actually and it’s kind of clouding my ability to provide adequate, unbiased information. 

Here’s why I loved this book and I recommend it: it makes you think and I admired Tara’s story. Even though it created a rift between her and her parents, even though it was the hardest thing she had to do in her life, she sought out the outside world and formed her own opinions. This book inspired me to really look at the way I was raised and if I believed everything my parents told me. Did I when I was young? Yes. But then I grew up and experienced other parts of the world and learned more.

I’m trying to keep this about the book and not get too personal, but I think everyone should read it. Even just for the shock to learn that Tara didn’t have a birth certificate until she was 9. She had to ask for it, and learned that many of her siblings weren’t registered either; Tara’s father believed that the government was using things like social security and the medical system to further a political agenda. They hardly went to the doctor, using at home homeopathic methods concocted by Tara’s mother. 

Tara’s father devoted his life to preparing for the End of Days. They canned food in the summers to stash away when the second coming finally arrived; he believed they would be the only ones prepared and their family would survive. The chapter on Y2K was particularly enlightening and I even found myself feeling oddly bad for Tara’s father. He has devoted his life and energy to preparing to keeping his family safe when the world ended. His devastation that he was wrong kind of made me tear up, even if I thought he was crazy the whole book. Though Tara went to a Mormon university, I don’t think she was technically raised as a mormon. I believe they were Christians and “survivalists”, but don’t quote me. 

I learned a lot from this book even if this review is scattered. I got this book from the library so I wasn’t able to make notes in it to annotate. Have you read EDUCATED? Let me know if you’d like to see a review of THE HILLBILLY ELEGY as well.