Educated: An Eye-Opening Memoir

I've valued few things above education my entire life. Education is often the ticket to freedom, and is vital for success in so many areas of life. Believing this, I read Educated filled with shock. This is real? There are Americans that grow up with no knowledge of the Holocaust, believing that medicine is what kills and public schools exist to brainwash?

Tara Westover's Educated blew me away and lived up to the hype surrounding its release. Dr. Westover never entered a classroom until her first day at Brigham-Young University, and her first test was the ACT to apply to BYU. She grew up on a mountain in Idaho with a large survivalist family that prepared constantly for the end of the world. She was made to believe she was a "whore" if she ever showed her shoulders, held hands with a boy, or behave in any suggestive manner. Women were to be submissive to men, always finding their place in the kitchen and serving their husbands.

The violence in Dr. Westover's story shocked me most. Her father expected every one of his children to work in the scrap yard with dangerous equipment. She began working in the yard when she should have been in elementary school. The stories of the nearly fatal injuries she and her siblings endured and survived were frightening to read, perhaps most because the family refused to use medicine or visit a hospital. Beyond the violence in the scrap yard outside the house, she experienced violence from her brother within the walls of her family home. Any slip of behavior that he deemed disrespectful for a woman or childlike would lead to him twisting her wrist nearly to the point of breaking or shoving her face into a toilet.

Dr. Westover's resilience and determination to find a life outside of her childhood was incredible. At fifteen she couldn't fathom the idea of leaving her family home, then just two years later she entered BYU as a freshman at seventeen. She taught herself as much as she could to catch up with her peers, then eventually passed them as she moved from BYU to Cambridge and Harvard. In a decade she went from asking a professor what the Holocaust was to earning her PhD in history from Cambridge University. The hurdles she not only cleared but soared over are awe-inspiring.

I've never been a big fan of memoirs, even as a history major. There are so many that it can be hard to sift through them and find the stories the world really needs to hear. Dr. Westover's is a story for everyone, whether because you also value education or you need inspiration for your own hurdles. Educated is an education for us all on self-invention and the power of knowledge.