Abstract
For many of us, college was our first experience being exposed to a wide variety of new perspectives and disciplines, outside of the beliefs and values embraced by our families. Educated, a memoir by Tara Westover, explores the trepidation of leaving home and finding new worlds through higher education. Westover’s book landed on President Barack Obama’s 2018 summer reading list, and it will undoubtedly be adopted by many instructors as a tool to spark discussion over the transformative power of a liberal education.
Westover recounts her story of growing up in rural Idaho, the daughter of survivalist parents with a deep mistrust of the government. Westover and her siblings did not go to public schools, they weren’t taken to see doctors, and they lived isolated lives with virtually no record of their existence outside of their own family. So how does someone from this background end up earning a PhD from Cambridge with a visiting fellowship at Harvard? The answers to this and additional compelling questions may provide the impetus for deep discussions in classes such as Introduction to Sociology, Sociology of Education, Deviance and Social Control, or Self and Society.
Educated is made up of 40 chapters, divided into three parts. In part one, Westover focuses on her unconventional childhood, where she and her siblings spent their days working scrapping metal in the family junkyard with their father or working in their home kitchen making tinctures and blending oils for their midwife mother. The lessons Westover learned in that phase of her life were practical ones. Public schooling wasn’t strictly forbidden, but Westover was reluctant to ask her father, who showed clear antipathy for public institutions and records, for permission to attend a local school. Instead, she learned what she could through self-guided independent study. For sociology courses and students, part one could be useful for discussions of norms and socialization, deviance and social control, family dynamics, cultural values, and different forms of education.
While she was growing up, Westover had an educational role model in her older brother, Tyler, who “loved book learning” (p. 45) and was the first in her family to go to college. He was an anomaly in their family, but he blazed a trail that Westover could follow if she had the drive and courage to do so. As a teenager, Westover studied religion on her own, reading the Book of Mormon and the New Testament and writing essays that no one would read. While it was painstaking and confusing work, she argues that time spent in independent study was vital to her education: “The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand” (p. 62).
Growing up, Westover could easily imagine her life marrying young and staying on her family’s farm and in her father’s good graces. Instead, she studied and learned math for the ACT so that she could have the opportunity to go to college. Her father warned her that she was inviting God’s wrath by choosing a college education, but her mother secretly encouraged her to “burst out of here in a blaze” (p. 133). Despite her own uncertainty and her father’s resistance, Westover made one of the most difficult choices of her life: She left her family to go to college and see the larger world.
In part two, Westover describes her time attending Brigham Young University. She was very much an outsider, having to learn the norms and habits of college students while trying to fit in and traversing brand-new terrain in every one of her classes. She quickly learned how much she was lacking in her very limited home schooling. In an early class, she asked the professor the meaning of the word holocaust; the professor thought it was a bad joke, and Westover was horrified when she looked it up and realized her own true ignorance (p. 157). Frustrated and failing some classes, Westover wrote in her journal: “I don’t understand why I wasn’t allowed to get a decent education as a child” (p. 163).
The steep learning curve continued for Westover in her first two years of college; current students may recognize shades of their own experience in becoming familiar with college courses and study skills. Westover was introduced to blue books and scantron exams; she learned that she needed to read the textbook to succeed in class and that she was able and even encouraged to speak to her professors outside of class. She learned to live with others, to pay her own bills, to think critically about her own deeply held beliefs and values, and to care for herself. She was exposed to issues like race relations and the history of slavery and Civil Rights in the United States, which she had never learned while growing up. While her father and her abusive brother, Shawn, labeled her uppity and other terrible names, Westover for the first time began to trust her own judgment and choices.
In part three, Westover recounts her extraordinary academic success amid continuing personal and family struggles. On the recommendation of her mentor, she applied for and won a prestigious Gates Scholarship, which provided full tuition, room, and board for Westover to attend graduate school at Cambridge. She was awarded a grant to study in Paris for a summer and then won a visiting fellowship to Harvard. And yet, while she excelled academically and became ever more comfortable with new friends and the university setting, she largely lost her family over her contentious relationship, or lack thereof, with her violent and abusive brother, Shawn. As she became more confident in her self-worth, she chose to stand up for herself, and that choice required deep personal sacrifices: “I had begun to conceive of what my education might cost me, and I had begun to resent it” (p. 293).
By the end of the book, Westover remains close to some family members and has completely disconnected from others. There is an intriguing question here for today’s students about the potential cost of an education: It is a transformation that can break us and rebuild us, but it always changes us as we are exposed to new perspectives and discover new truths. Westover grew apart from family members who were not able or willing to make similar explorations and could not accept the changes in her; she lost relationships over her new knowledge, understanding, and self-confidence.
These challenges and sacrifices may resonate with sociology students, especially with first-generation students, who likely face some of the same issues as they explore the new worlds that a college education can open for them. The benefits of a college education are widely touted, but it can be important to recognize that there are also potential costs. It can be difficult to blend back into your family and community after experiencing the larger world and being exposed to a wide range of perspectives. For some, this may be a real sacrifice in their quest to be able to learn and grow as an individual. This topic would lend itself particularly well to courses focused on education or capstone courses in sociology.
Educated is a well-written book and a fascinating story, but I was at times distracted and unsettled by the descriptions of Westover’s abuse at the hands of her extremely violent brother and her parents’ complicity in allowing that abuse to take place over many years. There were also some lurid details of untreated brain injuries suffered by her mother and brother and their lingering effects. These circumstances and stories were important for Westover’s development and to show her family’s aversion to hospitals and medical doctors, but they may be triggering for students, and instructors might want to give trigger warnings (Cares, Williams, and Hirschel 2013) before students start reading the book. In addition, the struggles and dilemmas that Westover goes through may be a bit much for first-year students, particularly first-generation students, who might find a great deal to identify with as they too are being exposed to and overwhelmed by new ideas and perspectives, perhaps for the first time.
Westover’s book could be fruitfully used as a case study in a variety of sociology courses, including Sociology of Education, Sociology of Family, Social Problems, Sociology of Inequality, and Deviant Behavior and Social Control. Educated is an accessible and interesting read, and it provides useful examples for concepts like norms, socialization, culture, religion, gender, and the social construction of reality. It could also be used for discussions on research methods and important differences between memoirs and case studies and empirical sociological research.
An assignment that may work well with Educated is to have students write their own sociological autobiography (Kebede 2009), touching on their own families, socialization, and education and considering their own stories in relation to Westover’s. While I would not necessarily recommend this assignment in an Introduction to Sociology course, it could make for a powerful discussion and debate in a capstone course or upper-division courses on relevant topics when students can compare their own pathways to becoming educated with those shared by Tara Westover. It may give them fresh insight to their own circumstances, including their own individual struggles and privileges, and the broad and complicated process of becoming educated.