Educated is a memoir written by Tara Westover which tells the story of her growing up in a devout family with a dad who is mentally ill. As a child, she is isolated from the rest of the world and doesn’t get involved with any kind of government meaning she didn’t attend a school or go to hospitals when she was injured. Every injury was up to God’s grace to heal and her mother’s herbs. Gene, her father and her brother Shawn are often portrayed as the villain of her memoir. They are both bipolar and try to control Westover and what she does, but Shawn is abusive towards her. She often overlooks this abuse as him not meaning to do it on purpose or that he is playing around with her without any ill intent. Growing up without knowing any better, Westover’s mindset has in a way been brainwashed to think that her father’s beliefs are always right. However, after she attends Brigham Young University, her mindset is slowly starting to shift. She is learning things that should be common knowledge and learning that her father’s teachings aren’t always correct both morally and factually.
When Westover turns seventeen, she takes the ACT and gets accepted into BYU which is a school made up mostly of Morman students. She doesn’t fit in because things that should have been common knowledge are new to her and she experiences a culture difference between her and her peers who are also Mormons like her. She doesn’t think of them as true Mormons and thinks of them as gentiles because of her father telling her “that most Mormons were gentiles, they just didn’t know it” (154). It is after she comes home from BYU that she realizes that her mindset has started to shift. She went back to her daily routine of working in the junkyard despite her protest at first because if she didn’t, her dad would not allow her to keep living in that house with him. Her dad and her brother Shawn both dislike how she has changed since coming back from BYU and tells her that she has become “uppity”. They both want to drag her down and remind her of her roots (175). Shawn’s way of doing that was by calling her by different names which didn’t bother her until one particular nickname: “Nigger”. Before she attended BYU, Shawn had previously called her by that name before and she had heard her father say it a couple of times but it never bothered her. She had also read her father’s favorite book on the American founding, which was about how slaves were happier and their owners had to do more work to take care of them which was logical to her at the time (178). However, while she was at BYU, she took an American history class that covered slavery and many important people during that time who took a stand against it. Because of this, her whole mindset changes and she realizes that what was once logical before isn’t, and what was once meaningless took on a whole new light.
Readers get to see how Westover’s mind continues to shift over time. In the beginning, her inner thoughts were things that we wouldn’t consider to be right, but now we can see how she is starting to change by going to BYU. She is starting to develop ideas and beliefs of her own instead of blindly believing in her father’s words and what she has known her whole life. Through BYU, she has gotten to know people who have the same religious belief as her but practice it in a different way which is foreign to her. She is also starting to learn more about American History and the real context behind it instead of small snippets she’s heard which can be incorrect. After only one semester at BYU, Westover’s mindset has already started becoming more open to change so readers will definitely look forward to reading more about how she grows and changes after a second semester at BYU.
Work Cited
Westover, Tara. Educated. Random, 2018.
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