Educated

by

Tara Westover

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Themes and Colors
Memory, History, and Subjectivity Theme Icon
Learning and Education Theme Icon
Devoutness and Delusion Theme Icon
Family, Abuse, and Entrapment Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Educated, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Learning and Education Theme Icon

Growing up the child of a Mormon fundamentalist with paranoid, extremist views—possibly exacerbated by bipolar disorder—Tara Westover was denied access to an education. Her father, Gene, believed that the American government used public schools to deliberately “brainwash” children, and refused to let his younger children attend school. Instead of receiving a formal education, Tara grew up studying the Bible, helping her mother mix and bless homemade herbal tinctures, and working alongside her older brothers in her father’s scrap yard. As Westover retroactively examines her childhood and her burgeoning desire for a traditional education—and her uneasy but enthusiastic transition into the world of knowledge and academia—she explores what it means to be educated, ultimately arguing that education doesn’t amounts to the books a person reads or the facts they memorize in school. Instead, education is a life-long process that encompasses how a person responds to the world around them, making decisions and changes—often painful ones—along the way.

The young Tara, deprived of traditional education, yearns for the normalcy and achievable goals that schooling provides. As she rebels against her parents’ disdainful and paranoid view of all educational institutions and seeks admission to college, though, Tara begins to learn that her education has been compromised more heavily than she previously realized. Tara has more to learn about the world than history and arithmetic—and as she spreads her wings and hungrily pursues higher and higher learning, she comes to see that though her education has been anything but traditional, she has been selling herself short all along by claiming to be uneducated. In fact, Tara has been educated in ways that many people never will be—the lessons she’s learned throughout her difficult adolescence about abuse, manipulation, and isolation and haven’t been pleasant, but have made her into the person she is and have prepared her to understand education as a journey rather than a destination. In spite of her parents’ insistence that public schools were “brainwashing” factories that turned innocent children into “socialists” and “gentiles,” Tara longed to be traditionally educated. She always knew she didn’t belong in her father’s scrap yard, and found herself drawn to books and reading despite the shortage of literature, textbooks, or learning materials in the household. Tara taught herself critical thinking and writing by studying the Book of Mormon and writings and journals of the early Mormon prophets, which were often composed in dense, nineteenth-century language. Tara spent hours poring over the pages, desperate to understand, to process, and to respond to the work of others. Looking back on her early attempts at self-directed learning from adulthood, she sees that the true education of her youth—“the one that would matter”—were the hours she spent developing “the patience to read things [she] could not yet understand.” The early days of Tara’s attempts at securing an education for herself were steeped in shame, secrecy, and self-reliance. Because her family saw all forms of traditional, secular education as tools of an evil and far-reaching conspiracy to “brainwash” the youth of the world, Tara was forced to hone the mechanics of academic and literary thought on her own, with essentially no roadmap. Her older brothers who broke with tradition and pursued education paved the way for her, but as a girl, things were different for Tara—and the pursuit of an education was, for her, not just frowned upon, but even dangerous, drawing the ire of her mother, father, and contemptuous older brother Shawn.

In the latter half of the book, which details Tara’s admittance to Brigham Young University and the start of her studies there, she comes to develop a more comprehensive view of what education is. When Tara starts class, she finds that she has never heard of major foundational aspects of world history, art, and culture, and as she asks for answers to basic questions, her classmates and teachers are often offended by her lack of knowledge. So many people around her fail to understand just how isolated and prescriptive Tara’s life has been, and can’t imagine not knowing what the Holocaust is—or the basics of roommate etiquette and personal hygiene such as regular hand-washing. As the overwhelmed Tara navigates the new terrain of independence, she sees that her education is lacking not only in book-smarts, but in the rules and regulations by which others move through the world. Tara has help along the way—though she gets off to a rocky start in some of her classes and friendships, she eventually finds roommates, boyfriends, and professors who understand that the large gaps in Tara’s academic and social education alike aren’t her fault at all. These friends—her roommate Robin, her teachers Dr. Kerry and Professor Steinberg, and her boyfriends at BYU and Cambridge, Nick and Drew—help Tara to accept that her education in the ways of the world will always be one that is in-progress and ever-changing. With the support networks she finds at Cambridge and BYU, Tara is able to stop seeing her past as shameful and understand the gravity of what she’s done for herself, her education, and her future in getting out of Idaho. Even in moments of profound doubt and fear, Tara slowly gains the tools to understand that her education has been her ability to distance herself from her abusive family, assert her desires and her needs, and begin to discern the difference between right and wrong, and fact and fiction. As a girl, Tara dreamed of education as the chance to sit in a classroom and study—as a woman, she understands that an education is much more broad, complex, and constantly evolving.

The memoir’s title, Educated, trickily implies that one can ever be “educated” completely or linearly. As the book progresses, Westover shows what a fallacy this idea in fact is. Her own education is a work-in-progress, a series of transformations that both pain and uplift her as she works her way through the world. Her education has entailed learning about art, history, and culture—all of the things that compromise traditional schooling—but its most important components have been rooted in learning about herself. As a girl, Tara dreamed of education as the chance to sit in a classroom and study—as a woman, she reveals that an education is much more broad and complex than academia, and that pursuing this kind of multi-faceted education is a life-long endeavor.

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Learning and Education Quotes in Educated

Below you will find the important quotes in Educated related to the theme of Learning and Education.
Prologue Quotes

I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountains, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Indian Princess
Page Number: xii
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Dad picked me up soon after on his way home from a job. He pulled up in his truck and honked for me to come out, which I did, my head bent low. Grandma followed. I rushed into the passenger seat, displacing a toolbox and welding gloves, while Grandma told Dad about my not washing. Dad listened, sucking on his cheeks while his right hand fiddled with the gearshift. A laugh was bubbling up inside him. Having returned to my father, I was taken by the power of his person. A familiar lens slid over my eyes and Grandma lost whatever strange power she’d had over me an hour before.

“Don’t you teach your children to wash after they use the toilet?” Grandma said.

Dad shifted the truck into gear. As it rolled forward he waved and said, “I teach them not to piss on their hands.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad (speaker), Grandma-over-in-town (speaker)
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

I’d always known that my father believed in a different God. As a child, I’d been aware that although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. They believed in modesty; we practiced it. They believed in God’s power to heal; we left our injuries in God’s hands. They believed in preparing for the Second Coming; we were actually prepared. For as long as I could remember, I’d known that the members of my own family were the only true Mormons I had ever known, and yet for some reason, here at this university, in this chapel, for the first time I felt the immensity of the gap. I understood now: I could stand with my family, or with the gentiles, on the one side or the other, but there was no foothold in between.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

But I couldn’t do the job, because to do it would be to slide backward. I had moved home, to my old room, to my old life. If I went back to working for Dad, to waking up every morning and pulling on steel toed boots and trudging out to the junkyard, it would be as if the last four months had never happened, as if I had never left.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Faye Westover / Mother (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad
Page Number: 168
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 28 Quotes

“Everyone has undergone a change,” [Dr. Kerry] said. “The other students were relaxed until we came to this height. Now they are uncomfortable, on edge. You seem to have made the opposite journey. This is the first time I’ve seen you at home in yourself. It’s in the way you move: it’s as if you’ve been on this roof all your life.”

[…]

I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head.”

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Dr. Kerry (speaker)
Page Number: 237
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 30 Quotes

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. Marley had written that line a year before his death, while an operable melanoma was, at that moment, metastasizing to his lungs, liver, stomach and brain. I imagined a greedy surgeon with sharp teeth and long, skeletal fingers urging Marley to have the amputation. I shrank from this frightening image of the doctor and his corrupt medicine, and only then did I understand, as I had not before, that although I had renounced my father’s world, I had never quite found the courage to live in this one.

I flipped through my notebook to the lecture on negative and positive liberty. In a blank corner I scratched the line, None but ourselves can free our minds. Then I picked up my phone and dialed. “I need to get my vaccinations,” I told the nurse.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad
Page Number: 258
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 36 Quotes

While they plotted how to reconvert me, I plotted how to let them. I was ready to yield, even if it meant an exorcism. A miracle would be useful: if I could stage a convincing rebirth, I could dissociate from everything I’d said and done in the last year. I could take it all back—blame Lucifer and be given a clean slate. I imagined how esteemed I would be, as a newly cleansed vessel. How loved. All I had to do was swap my memories for theirs, and I could have my family.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker), Gene Westover / Dad, Faye Westover / Mother
Page Number: 300
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 40 Quotes

Until that moment [the girl in the mirror] had always been there. No matter how much I appeared to have changed—how illustrious my education, how altered my appearance—I was still her. At best I was two people, a fractured mind. She was inside, and emerged whenever I crossed the threshold of my father’s house.

That night I called on her and she didn’t answer. She left me. She stayed in the mirror. The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self.

You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.

I call it an education.

Related Characters: Tara Westover (speaker)
Page Number: 328-329
Explanation and Analysis: