Educated: A Memoir

Is contained in

Canonical title*

Leerschool

Original title

Educated

Original publication date

2018-02-18; 2018

People/Characters

Tara Westover; Faye Westover; Gene Westover; Tony Westover; Shawn Westover; Tyler Westover (show all 26); Luke Westover; Audrey Westover; Richard Westover; Charles; Nick; Drew Mecham; Myrna Moyle; Jay Moyle; Mary Moyle; Caroline Moyle; Rosa Parks; Emmett Till; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Randy Weaver; Sammy Weaver; Vicki Weaver; Emily Westover; Jonathan Steinberg; Anna Mathea; David Runciman

Important places

Idaho, USA; Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK; Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; Buck's Peak; Brigham Young University, Utah, USA; Utah, USA (show all 13); Malad City, Idaho, USA; Worm Creek, Idaho, USA; Arizona, USA; Trinity College, University of Cambridge; King's College, Cambridge University, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, UK; Ruby Ridge, Idaho, USA; Rome, Italy

Important events

Y2K; Siege at Ruby Ridge

Epigraph

The past is beautiful because one never realises an emotion at the time. It expands later, & thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past. - Virginia Woolf

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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 Dewey

Dedication

For Tyler

First words

My strongest memory is not a memory.

Quotations

...I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had been wrested. (p. 180)

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...something shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us ... (show all)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 who sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others--because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward. (p. 180)

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I had decided to study no history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I'd felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movement--since realizing that what a person know... (show all)s about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected--a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with their own ignorance and partiality. I thought that if I could accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile myself with the fact that the history of most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught. Dad could be wrong, and the great historians Carlyle and Macauley and Trevelyan could be wrong, but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it. (p. 238)

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It's strange how you give the people you love so much power over you, I had written in my journal. ... He had defined me to myself, and there's no greater power than that. (p. 199)

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I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind, to be reshaped according to the contours of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think, n... (show all)ot how to think for myself. (p. 239)

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I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanized and brutalized others--because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way ... (show all)forward.   (p. 180)

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My life was narrated for me by others.  Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute.  It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs. (P. 197)

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This moment would define my memory of that night, and of the many nights like it, for a decade. In it I saw myself as unbreakable, as tender as stone. At first I merely believed this, until one day it became the truth. Then I... (show all) was able to tell myself, without lying, that it didn’t affect me, that he didn’t affect me, because nothing affected me. I didn’t understand how morbidly right I was. How I had hollowed myself out. For all my obsessing over the consequences of that night, I had misunderstood the vital truth: that its not affecting me, that was its effect. (p. 111)

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I believed then—and part of me will always believe—that my father’s words ought to be my own. (p. 172)

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What was important to me wasn’t love or friendship, but my ability to lie convincingly to myself: to believe I was strong. I could never forgive Charles for knowing I wasn’t. (p. 189)

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I wonder now if the day I set out to steal that tax return wasn’t the first time I left home to go to Buck’s Peak. That night I had entered my father’s house as an intruder. It was a shift in mental language, a surrende... (show all)ring of where I was from. My own words confirmed it. When other students asked where I was from, I said, “I’m from Idaho,” a phrase that, as many times as I’ve had to repeat it over the years, has never felt comfortable in my mouth. When you are part of a place, growing that moment in its soil, there’s never a need to say you’re from there. I never uttered the words “I’m from Idaho” until I’d left it. (p. 206)

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I had to think before I could answer. “I can stand in this wind, because I’m not trying to stand in it,” I said. “The wind is just wind. You could withstand these gusts on the ground, so you can withstand them in the ... (show all)air. There is no difference. Except the difference you make in your head.” He stared at me blankly. He hadn’t understood. “I’m just standing,” I said. “You are all trying to compensate, to get your bodies lower because the height scares you. But the crouching and the sidestepping are not natural. You’ve made yourselves vulnerable. If you could just control your panic, this wind would be nothing.” “The way it is nothing to you,” he said. — I WANTED THE MIND of a scholar, but it seemed that Dr. Kerry saw in me the mind of a roofer. The other students belonged in a library; I belonged in a crane. (p. 237)

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...vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people. (p... (show all). 327)

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I am not the child my father raised, but he is the father who raised her. (p. 328)

Last words

(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I call it an education.

Publisher's editor

Redmon, Hilary; Ward, Andy; Hamilton, Jocasta

Blurbers

Vance, J.D.; Cahalan, Susannah; Chua, Amy; Dederer, Claire; Corrigan, Kelly; Simpson, Mona (show all 8); Fry, Stephen; Person, Cea Sunrise

Original language

English

Canonical DDC/MDS

270.092; 371.8092

Canonical LCC

CT3262.I2