Tara Westover’s “Educated” Part One

Experience

Quotes:

• The past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. —Virginia Woolf
• “I am only seven, but I understand that it is this fact, more than any other, that makes my family different: we don’t go to school” (xii).
• I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected. (xii)
• “It felt oddly dispossessing, being handed this first legal proof of my personhood: until that moment, it had never occured to me that proof was required” (20).
• “What was happening now had happened before. This was the second severing of mother and daughter. The tape was playing in a loop” (30).
• “The older boys—Tony, Shawn and Tyler—had been raised in a different decade, and it was almost as if they’d had different parents” (47).
• The other girls rarely spoke to me, but I loved being there with them. I loved the sensation of conformity. Learning to dance felt like learning to belong. I could memorize the movements and, in doing so, step into their minds, lunging when they lunged, reaching my arms upward in time with theirs….We moved together, a single flock. (78-79)
• “Home had changed the moment I’d taken Shawn to that hospital instead of to Mother. I had rejected some part of it; now it was rejecting me” (149).

Questions:

• Do you think this Virginia Woolf quote in the epigraph embodied Educated, at least from what you read so far? Why or why not?
• How does Tara’s experiences help her become who she is today?
• Even though Tara’s experiences may differ from your own, were you able to relate to it in some way or another? Why or why not?

Education

Quotes:

• I believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing. —John Dewy
• Grandma thought we should be in school and not, as she put it, “roaming the mountain like savages.” Dad said public school was a ploy by the Government to lead children away from God. “I may as well surrender my kids to the devil himself,” he said, “as send them down the road to that school.” (5)
• “Learning in our family was entirely self-directed: you could learn anything you could teach yourself, after your work was done” (46).

Questions:

• Do you think this John Dewy quote in the epigraph embodied Educated, at least from what you read so far? Why or why not?
• How are education and life related?
• How did Tara’s view on education change?

Perspective

Quotes:

• Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain. (xii)
• All my father’s stories were about our mountain, our valley, our jagged little patch of Idaho. He never told me what to do if I left the mountain, if I crossed oceans and continents and found myself in strange terrain, where I could no longer search the horizon for the Princess. He never told me how I’d know when it was time to go home.(xiii)
• “Midwifing changed my mother. She was a grown woman with seven children, but this was the first time in her life that she was, without question or caveat, the one in charge” (17).
• “I realized now that that night I was seeing her for the first time, the secret strength of her” (22).
• “I don’t know when the man in the photograph became the man I know as my father. Perhaps there was no single moment” (29).
• It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn’t fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune. In our family, that was Tyler. He was waltzing while the rest of us hopped a jig; he was deaf to the raucous music of our lives, and we were deaf to the serene polyphony of his. (43)
• In that moment she was transformed. Maybe it was something in the shape of her eyes, the way they squinted at me in disbelief, or maybe it was the hard line of her mouth, which was clamped shut, determined. Or maybe it was nothing at all, just the same old woman looking like herself and saying the things she always said. Maybe her transformation was merely a temporary shift in my perspective—for that moment, perhaps the perspective was his, that of the brother I hated, and loved. (53)
• “All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine—that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself” (102).
• “There’s a world out there, Tara,” he said. “And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear.” (120)
• “Perhaps reality was not wholly volatile. Perhaps it could be explained, predicted. Perhaps it could be made to make sense” (125).
• “I felt weak, then wholly powerless. I remembered that my life was not mine. I could be taken out of my body at any moment, dragged heavenward to reckon with a furious Father” (133).
• “Something broke in me, a dam or a levee. I felt tossed about, unable to hold myself in place. I screamed but the screams were strangled; I was drowning” (137).
• Sitting across from me is my father, and as I look into his worn face it hits me, a truth so powerful I don’t know why I never understood it before. The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter. I am a traitor, a wolf among sheep; there is something different about me that difference is not good. (147-148)

Questions:

• Why is perspective important?
• How did Tara’s perspective change?
• How did everyone’s different perspectives impact Tara?

Choices

Quotes:

• “We understood that the dissolution of Mother’s family was the inauguration of outs. The two could not exist together. Only one could have her” (28).
• “All the decisions that go into making a life—the choices people make, together and on their own, that combine to produce any single event” (40).
• “But as long as you live under Dad’s roof, it’s hard to go when he asks you not to, easy to delay just one more year, until there aren’t any years left. If you start as a sophomore, can you even graduate?”
  We both knew I couldn’t.
  “It’s time to go, Tara,” Tyler said. “The longer you stay, the less likely you will ever leave.”
  “You think I need to leave?”
  Tyler didn’t blink, didn’t hesitate. “ I think this is the worst possible place for you.” He spoke softly, but it felt as though he’d shouted the words. (120)

Questions:

• How do choices play a role in life?
• How did other people’s choices impact Tara’s life?
• How did Tara’s choices impact her own life?