Educated is a hot book and by that, I mean that this book is controversial, provocative and ultimately not a conclusive end to a story. Tara Westover writes her memoir as a woman growing up in a survivalist Mormon family that refused to send her to school and believed public healthcare was a government conspiracy. Non-spoiler: she ultimately leaves the home and enrolls in college.  What makes the book gripping though is the opportunity to hear a story so astounding that you’d never underestimate the human potential to live by a way and never let go.

The book is cleaved into two parts. The first deals with Tara’s upbringing. We’re told early on that Tara doesn’t have a birth certificate because she was delivered at home. In fact, her parents can’t even remember the day she was born. We see many more departures from what is thought of as “a good upbringing” – Tara is “homeschooled” which ultimately refers to being provided a book and left alone, she’s also made to help her Dad with scrapping which sounds as dangerous as it is, and she’s never given proper medicine or treatment because the family practices some variation of herbal and naturalistic treatment. We are lucky that Tara keeps a journal because the level of detail that we become privy to, despite the initial uneasiness it causes, illuminates a way of life that is just short of impossible.

The second part shows Tara going to college upon the prompting of her older brother. She discovers that her knowledge of the world had been severely limited – a striking episode shown is when she remarks out loud that she’s never heard of The Holocaust.  She learns about privilege, about racism and about how to understand our world through new lenses. Her lack of a formal education becomes surprisingly a strength for Tara, however, as she develops fresh and original opinions, uninterrupted by the burdens of societal conditioning. This realization ultimately condemns her relationship with her past as she is now aware of the missteps and problems back home. She is now faced with a whole set of ethical choices she was never ready to encounter.

Educated is a great book for a number of reasons. It takes you to an extreme human lifestyle and forces the reader to accept normalcy for the sake of the narrative. This is Tara’s story after all and who are we to immediately impose our own narratives on hers? Yet, as Tara takes us through her education in the literal school of hard knocks, we are forced to evaluate how our own education has played out in contemporary society. Where did we first learn that family can be complex? Where did we first learn that you can push through the struggle? For Tara, it’s probably much earlier than for us. Granted, she reviews her life through the lens of a grown adult but her actions at a young age demonstrate the kind of growth that is unfortunate in some ways and fortunate in others. I’ll be honest – there are levels of abuse here that are frequently sickening and frightening. But they are normalized, and Tara still holds love towards most of her family. I read plenty of reviews condemning her inability to feel hatred for her upbringing but I think that would discount how much one’s upbringing shapes their views of the world. To hate their whole childhood can be crippling for the identity.

Her grappling with traditional education also exposes the principles upon which our own pedagogies have been built. I’ve always taken for granted the path of my education. The Singapore system is a pretty deterministic one: step on the right foot stones and you’re on your way to a certain career profile. Educated shows us what those foot stones actually entail and why they are so important in the first place. I’m not too jealous of Tara’s original perspective on things but I do question how much my own paradigms are shaped by what people tell me rather than my individual take on the world.

In our book club, I questioned the value of a memoir such as this, as a thought experiment more than anything else. What’s the point in developing deep empathy, a feature of Educated that is inescapable, with this set of characters if there’s almost zero chance that you will ever meet anyone like them? I got some interesting responses but the one that struck me the most was that it was worthwhile to understand what the human condition can be like. There are some dark and dirty places explored in this book, the consequences of which have caused Tara to have a public falling out with her family. But there are also stories of redemption and hope. There are a lot more places in the messy moderate but Tara takes us through them with sincerity, compassion and a commitment to narrating a tale of growth.

There are few books like this out there. I was actually reminded of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy that I read a while back but Educated definitely is a more unique tale. You can’t put down this book and think that your understanding of the world is the same anymore. For that reason alone, I’d recommend it.

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create.”

Here are my ratings for the book:

Readability: 5/5

Intellectual Stimulation: 4/5

Perspective Shifting Capability: 4/5

Would I Recommend? – YES