Educated, by TARA WESTOVER
This story is steeped in education, and the unknown ways, in which it can help the personal mental
growth of an individual, aside from paving a future and offering lifelong connections.
Westover survived family ridicule and their mental illnesses, an out-of-touch religion and her own pre-
ordered faith through getting an education.
Without saying it, she very heavily points out that the lack of education and schooling is at the core
of her family’s and community’s downfall. Throughout this story I am reminded of Plato’s Allegory
of the Cave and what enlightenment (and the lack there of) can mean for some people.
Despite the true accounts in the book, Westover comes off as an unreliable narrator to me. She’s
repetitive and sinks the reader into many scenes too long. And though it is written in first person, I
hardly get a sense of her beyond being told of her academic prowesses. I have a stronger sense of
her father, abusive brother and the traumas she suffered.
The Mormon Fundamentalist culture (different to Mormon) is very insular and insecure, relying on
tradition and masking the thwarted culture in doctrine to promote and sustain their way of life. An
education, especially for women of this faith, can lift them up and out of the objectification and
subordination they’re being bred for.
Overall, Westover’s account of her young life, her father and abusive brother, and then her
schooling at Cambridge and Harvard is written very detailed…perhaps too much… but with a
shallow sense of her. Her voice isn’t strong perhaps deliberately to show her early weaknesses and
subsequent growth into her new educated self.
She’s very methodical and even meditative in showing her growth through education which sometimes feels like an advertisement to the reader
to get educated. But she was fortunate to earn scholarships and have financial support from her
mentors so the commercialism around the easy access to education often feels false.