Tara Westover’s Educated
is marketed as 2018’s Hillbilly Elegy.
The surface level plot is about how your family—in Westover’s case, insular Mormon
survivalists in Idaho—can mess you up, and how education can save you. Westover’s
publisher won endorsements from J.D. Vance as well as Vance’s Yale Law School
mentor Amy Chua. It is centrally about the redemptive power of education.
Educated’s
effectiveness, though, lies in charting the path of education and its political
significance. Hillbilly Elegy’s power
is in J. D. Vance’s intimate descriptions of the chaos in his family,
especially the ever-shifting cast of boyfriends in his mother’s life. Vance grew
out of that experience into a moderate Republican, convinced of the power of
the disciplined individual to move into a stable and gratifying personal life. Educated’s politics are more basic, not
partisan, but about the polis. Westover’s
political message lies in her unpacking of how education works. For her first
sixteen years, Westover had no formal education. Although she was nominally
homeschooled, her formal teaching was limited to reading and basic arithmetic. In
its etymological Latin sense, to educate someone is to “lead them out.”
Westover’s education leads her inexorably away from her natal family by
teaching her how to see the world from multiple perspectives. While education
permanently fractures her family, it also liberates her.
Drawing on the
tools from her doctoral studies in history, Westover’s primary sources for
reconstructing her escape are her journals and emails and the memories of some
of her siblings, as well as her own recollections. It takes some three quarters
of the memoir for Westover to unfold the horror at the core of her family. Her
father’s extremist stance against public education, the government, and the “Medical
Establishment” animate the book from the start. But it is not his beliefs
themselves that are the core problem for his daughter. What Westover ultimately
cannot live with are the physical and emotional abuse from her brother, her
father’s prioritization of his patriarchy and business over his children’s
well-being, and her mother’s willful blindness.
Overlapping with her slow recognition
of her willingness to rupture the family bond is Westover’s narrative how accessing
a formal education allowed her to see the world entirely differently from the
paternal indoctrination that shaped her childhood. In the second three quarters
of Educated, we slowly watch the
scales drift from Westover’s eyes. As she realizes that her new educated worldview
will permanently sever her from her family, she falls into a temporary madness,
wasting her a fellowship at Harvard binge-watching television instead of
working on her scholarship. But by the end Westover has triumphantly earned a
PhD with a dissertation that includes, inter alia, an analytical reading of the
Mormon sacred texts that she grew up studying with religious eyes—a radical
break.
Westover
never went to school until she was seventeen. After teaching herself enough
mathematics to win a high-enough ACT score to be admitted to Brigham Young
University, Westover begins to learn about events that her parents never
bothered to let her know existed, starting with the Holocaust. More important
than her ever-increasing knowledge, though, Westover shows herself moving
through three essential epistemological problems. First, she has to learn how
to distinguish what is true. The process starts in her dormitory, where she is
astonished that the roommate with “Juicy” written on her backside goes to
church. Initially, most of the other (similarly immodest) Mormon students at
BYU seem to be what her family would have called “gentiles.” After several
false starts, Westover learns that her roommates and new friends can teach her
valuable things about how to get along in the world—including the importance of
washing one’s hands after using the bathroom and that you have read the art
history textbook, not just look at the images.
Next, Westover
reveals herself discovering the existence and value of perspectives other than the
sole view cultivated by her family. That there is more than one way to see the
world comes home to her most dramatically when her abusive older brother mocks
her face blackened with dirt from summer work and spends months calling her the
N-word. Westover narrates how she suddenly connected his taunts with the images
of Civil Rights demonstrators she had learned about in a history class at BYU.
Recognizing that her family “had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole
purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others,” Westover stops laughing along;
“The word and the way Shawn said it hadn’t changed; only my ears were
different.” (pp. 180-181).
Finally, Westover
explores whether one’s own memories can be trusted. In the book, she narrates
several events whose exact sequence and details she remains unsure of, even
when she was present as a witness to their aftermath—one brother’s burn, and
another’s brain injury. Rather than just accept her own versions, historian
that she became, Westover consults with the siblings who are still speaking to her
to reconstruct what probably happened. She also flags those narratives as
potentially unreliable and what the uncertainty over the exact details means
for what kind of man her father actually is, softening his portrayal from a
dictator to a fallible and flawed man. As further testimony to her intellectual
honesty, Westover also marks passages where she has paraphrased emails instead
of quoting them directly.
In short, Westover’s memor shows
how far she has come from the certainties of the single worldview of her
childhood. While there are things that are true, there is also more than one
way to see the world, and a careful person acknowledges the limitations of her
vision.
In these senses, Educated is a paean to the value of a
liberal arts education. The education Westover received at conservative Brigham
Young University, and then the venerable University of Cambridge and Harvard
University, was not indoctrination in politically liberal values like
tolerance, compassion, and the Democratic party—not the brainwashing of “liberal
professors” (p. 134) that her father railed against. Instead, it was liberal in
its fundamental (again etymological) sense: liberal as free. Westover’s
education literally freed her from the bonds (=chains) of her family, whose
patriarch systematically forced them to acknowledge only a single point of view—his.
Westover shows us that education that is liberal—literally liberal—sets you
free.
This praise for education is a
vital political message for 2018, which perhaps explains why this book is
resonating so deeply with American audiences.[1]
If Hillbilly Elegy gives us insight
into Trump voters, then Westover’s memoir reminds us how the skills embedded in
liberal education—delivered with nuance, modesty, and skepticism—matter in securing
American freedom and democracy.
Tara Westover, Educated:
A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2018).
[1] As
of this writing, Educated is #44 on
Amazon’s bestselling books list, with 906 customer reviews. There are a few
negative reviews, including one that doubts Educated’s
credibility and compares it to James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.
