学进去

“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them.” Tara now says. It’s hard to understand these words until I read Tara Westover’s memoir Educated.

In her book Educated, Tara was raised in rural Idaho. Her dad believed the world was coming to an end, and that the family should interact with the health and education systems as little as possible. Major medical crises went untreated-her mother never recovered from her brain injury. Because Tara and her six siblings worked at their father’s junkyard， none of them received proper homeschooling.

Educated is an amazing story. I found it fascinating how it took studying philosophy and history in school for Tara to trust her own perception of the world. Before stepping foot in a classroom until she was 17, her worldview was entirely shaped by her dad. It wasn’t until she went to Brigham Young University that she realized there were other perspectives on things her dad had presented as fact. Eventually, she earned her doctorate in history from Cambridge. Of the seven Westover siblings, three earned Ph. D.s. I think their childhood experience made them tough and helped them persevere. When you meet Tara, she is never cruel even when mentioning her childhood traumas, including the physical abuse she suffered. I was impressed by how she talks so openly about how ignorant she once was.

Educated touches on the divides in our country: rural versus urban, college-educated versus not. Since she’s spent her whole life moving between these two worlds, I asked Tara what she thought. “I worry that education is becoming a stick that some people use to beat other people into submission or becoming something that people feel arrogant (傲慢的) about,” she said. “I think education is really just a process of self-discovery-of developing a sense of self and what you think. I think of it as this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing.”

Tara’s process of self-discovery is beautifully captured in Educated. She’s a talented writer, and I suspect this book isn’t the last.