Educated: Cautionary Tale or Beacon of Hope?

What happens when parents raise children in total isolation, cutting them off from everyone else in civilization? Imagine reaching the age of seventeen, without ever stepping foot into a classroom. That was a young woman, named Tara Westover’s reality. She had never even seen a standardized test, let alone filled out those infamous multiple-choice bubble sheets. The basic concept of “assigned reading” was foreign to her—she thought textbooks were just for flipping through the pictures. It’s safe to say, Tara was Alice in Wonderland when it came to school.

Her debut memoir titled, Educated, unfolds within the rugged “sediment” mountains of Clifton, Idaho. The town where her eccentric, survivalist family lived off-grid. Tara’s story is as much about place, as it is about people. Her “ultra-conservative” upbringing is rooted in a non-fundamentalist strain of Mormonism that’s far different from the mainstream culture. The cast of characters in her family are unforgettable. The nonfiction storyline reminds me of a mashup between Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me. However, Educated is often grouped more with survival/escape memoirs like The Glass Castle or Hillbilly Elegy.

Educated is, undeniably, a gripping story. However, it’s still worth acknowledging the privilege that underpins Tara’s journey. Despite her lack of formal education, her writing talent opened doors for her at Cambridge and Harvard—opportunities that may not have been extended to a person of color or someone else with less “intriguing” circumstances. The teachers, who championed her, saw in her a narrative that fit their idea of resilience. Tara is candid about her academic insecurities, especially with math and science. However, she isn’t so revealing about the long struggle to learn the subjects that she was required to pass, or in other words, the variety of prerequisites.

The author’s knowledge of English became her lifeline. Tara never had to deal with the social pressures of grade school from underfunded public schools or the systemic injustices. Instead, she entered higher education, as something of a blank slate, and her trajectory was propelled—at least in part—by the unspoken force of white privilege. Her memoir glosses over just how steep that learning curve truly was, and at times, it reads as if Tara simply leapt from outsider to prodigy overnight. Yet and still, she has earned several awards for her critically acclaimed writing, and I believe her inspirational narrative is worth the read.

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