I’ve been recommended this book at least three times now? First my prefect, then two friends from middle school. Even before that, I had seen Educated in every store and all over the internet since it came out in 2018.
I have seen Educated compared to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, but I don’t think Tara Westover has much in common with J.D. Vance aside from growing up in the Midwest. I certainly did not read this book as a Mormon, female J.D. Vance writing about the path slightly less taken, taking care to sugarcoat the rough parts. For me, Educated was about the value and cost of a liberal arts education, and to a greater extent, its ability to liberate and alienate.
Let’s talk first about the ethical costs of receiving an education and moving up.
I have also been reading Jennifer Morton’s Moving Up Without Losing Your Way recently, and that definitely colored the lens through which I read Educated. Although I am only a fifth of the way through that book, Morton’s central thesis is as follows:
Transcending the circumstances of one’s birth comes with a heavy cost felt across many aspects of our lives that we value — relationships with family and friends, our connection to our communes, and our sense of identity.
I’ve seen this theme about the ethical costs of moving up across the books that I’ve read this year. In Undocumented, Dan-el Padilla Peralta wrote, “I’d be confronted by the differences between HarlemWorld and the Upper West, no matter how hard I tried to shut them out. The hood would come knocking—or just smash through the door.” And it’s certainly a prevalent theme in Educated.
For Tara, moving up comes with tremendous consequences: feelings of alienation and guilt. In several instances, Tara writes about feeling as if she had betrayed her family by leaving them behind to pursue an education, and more so to challenge the perspectives handed down by her father.
I preferred the family I had chosen to the one I had been given, so the happier I became in Cambridge, the more my happiness was made fetid by my feeling that I had betrayed Buck’s Peak.
Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind.
Another quote from Tara here about traveling through Europe with her Cambridge companions as a first-generation, low income (FGLI) student, or someone who is the first in her family to attend college and comes from a lower economic background:
My companions moved through the city differently, aware of its significance but not subdued by it...There was a kind of symbiosis in their relationship to these grand places: they gave life to the ancient architecture by making it the backdrop of their discourse, by refusing to worship at its altar as if it were a dead thing.
The other takeaway I had comes from the second quote, and it is about the value of the liberal arts education that I have the luxury of pursuing. In particular, these quotes spoke to me:
Curiosity is a luxury reserved for the financially secure: my mind was absorbed with more immediate concerns, such as the exact balance of my bank account, who I owed how much, and whether there was anything in my room I could sell for ten or twenty dollars.
There is a lot of talk at my school about intellectual vitality and curiosity — pursuing knowledge for the sake of itself. In a similar vein, elite students are often criticized for choosing to go into banking, consulting, or finance, or for being overly focused on their careers.
This model for evaluating students doesn’t recognize that it is exhausting for financially insecure students to constantly “have curiosity.” It does not sit right with me to evaluate the character of disadvantaged groups in the same context as other privileged groups; for some, it can take as much grit to survive, as someone like me with immense privilege needed to pursue many passion projects with the confidence that I had the resources to thrive.
I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others— because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.
In retrospect, I see that this was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who’d deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.
Tara showed that a liberal arts education is so much more than curiosity and intellectual exploration alone; it is more than thriving in the pursuits of inglorious leisure (studiis florentem ignobilis oti, Virgil, Georgics 4.564). Being educated means having the courage to learn and unlearn, questioning what we have been taught, and being patient enough to read things we cannot yet understand.