Sunday, May 13, 2018

Tara Westover’s EDUCATED: A MEMOIR


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.

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