Educated by Tara Westover

Tara Westover and her family grew up preparing for the End of Days but, according to the government, she didn’t exist. She hadn’t been registered for a birth certificate. She had no school records because she’d never set foot in a classroom, and no medical records because her father didn’t believe in hospitals.

As she grew older, her father became more radical and her brother more violent. At sixteen, Tara knew she had to leave home. In doing so, she discovered both the transformative power of education, and the price she had to pay for it.

Educated is an eye-opening memoir. Growing up as the youngest of a large Mormon family in rural Idaho, Tara and her siblings are home-schooled with a strongly conservative religious focus. As a daughter, her education is not particularly important to her parents; it is more important that she grows up to be a good and pious wife. The family is isolated from the rest of the world as her father is highly suspicious of public institutions such as hospitals, schools and the government.

When they are not studying passages from the Bible, Tara and her siblings are helping their father in his metal scrapyard. Tara’s father does not implement any safety measures, despite his belief that professional medical intervention is out of the question. When ten-year-old Tara sustains horrific injuries falling from a height to the ground, she is treated with herbal remedies made by her mother. Tara’s father is not motivated to mitigate the safety risks in his scrapyard, even when he is the victim of his own unsafe environment.

Tara has the sense that this life is not for her. Although she fears that she will be divinely punished for seeking a different track to the one her parents have in mind for her, she expresses a desire to go to school. Her parents oppose this but one of her brothers coaches her through the entrance exam and she finally sets foot in a school at the age of 17, and a few years later is accepted into Brigham Young University, a Mormon university in Utah.

There is so much that she does not know, and her innocent ignorance occasionally causes serious offence. To remedy this, she takes it upon herself to research and read as much as she can to learn about the normal things that everyone else seems to know. Her independence and determination to educate herself eventually lead her to pursue a PhD at Cambridge University.

Educated is a sobering insight into the damage that can be caused by such a strict and conservative upbringing. It is not reading material for the faint-hearted as there are incidents of sexism, physical violence and emotional abuse.

Taking this into account, however, it is all the more incredible that Tara transformed her life so completely in her journey from small-town Idaho to Cambridge University in her determined pursuit of an education.