Recently one of my go to book buddies recommended that I read "Educated" by Tara Westover. Since I take all of her suggestions extremely seriously and the audiobook was immediately available on my library app, I started the book that night. Though as I'm no longer commuting to an office I am much slower finishing audiobooks than I used to be and it took me over a month to finish.
This memoir is beyond intense and had my friend and I talking about the effects of bi-polarism, how intricate an abusive persons mind is and how education should be encouraged as a thirst for learning.
One thing that really stuck with me was how much of our education we take for granted. Or I guess I should say, how much of my education I took for granted. I was homeschooled through eighth grade. While my parents didn't believe public schools were a socialist plot, I was kept home and schooled there because my mother didn't get the help she needed in school and felt that a one on one environment was better. To me I don't consider what Tara's family referred to as "homeschool" as any kind of school at all. When I was homeschooled I had a set schedule, in elementary school I had to be downstairs working on my household chores by 7, in middle school that was 6:30 am. Then I had to have breakfast eaten, chores done, be dressed and at my desk by 8 am. There was a bookshelf dedicated to me and one to my sister with all of our current schoolbooks on it along with our notebooks, a binder elaborating our schedule in hour increments, anything we didn't finish in that time we spent the afternoon working on till it was done. My mom put in an immense amount of work to insure my sister and I were not only on par with the public schools but ahead of them. We were taught how to think and how to self-teach/study on our own, she was there if we needed help but independent work was encouraged. Reading more about topics that interested us was encouraged.
That is how education should be in my opinion....calm down I'm not saying ya'll should homeschool your kids, that is an insanely large commitment and should not be made lightly. What I mean is rather than teaching to tests as schools often do (I'm not blaming teachers, they don't always have freedom with their curriculum). We should be teaching our children an innate love of learning. To find additional sources, to question, to ponder. Yes, teach them math, how to write an essay, history etc, but teach them to really learn and not spew facts back that they'll forget the moment a test is over.
I was very fortunate, I have several examples of this, not only my mom but teachers in my high school and college. In my tenth grade English class we had minimal assigned reading. I think we only read a couple books in that class together. What we did do was choose our novels. I believe we were given a set of criteria, but other than that we could read whatever we wanted (in class not as homework). Then at the end of 30 minutes we'd write down a quote that stood out to us, how many pages we read etc and our scheduled essays were based off whichever book we had personally been reading.
In college I took a religion class, we studied several religions, but for the 10 page paper and presentation to the class as our midterm, we were free to choose any religion we wanted as our topic. When I say any, I mean any, it did not have to be a religion we discussed in class. Some people chose religions they were or had been a part of. I chose Celtic druidism, which of course was passed down mostly orally and to this day I'm not sure how I got a fully comprehensive 10 page paper out of it, but the point is, I enjoyed it. That was the least nervous I have ever been for a presentation because I was passionate, I was fascinated with my topic.
This is what education should be. Not when we get to college, but from the beginning. Allowing students to follow whims, to learn how to think, to make hypothesis, defend those hypothesis, bring something new to the table.
It made me so happy when Tara's professor listened to her explain something about Mormonism and family and told her that's what her PHD thesis should be on. That was an amazing teacher right there. Pushing her to follow her gut, to learn something that she was interested in.
The fact that Tara made it to 16 or 17 without knowing what the holocaust was baffled me...but again, I was given a formal education even if it was at home. I thought it was cruel how her classmates and professor treated her for asking the simple question of what it was...yet the reality is, I feel that a lot of us would have the same reaction. We would think someone was playing a cruel joke, because we learned about it in school.
Which also brought to light for me all of the things we didn't learn about in school. Things that for some of us were passed down in the horror stories from our ancestors, and others of us were completely oblivious to because it had been whitewashed out of our society. Which again makes me ponder education, because even in my mother's attempt to provide my sister and I even more information than a public school would provide us, things were glossed over or not taught because she didn't have the resources to them. Things like the Tulsa Race Riots, or the mass graves that are now being dug up at the residential schools, let alone the fact that the last one (as of my research last week) closed in 1996...when I was 3 years old.
Tara Westover has a PHD. She is Dr. Westover. The girl who was denied education as a child not only passed college, a masters program, but earned a PHD. It was obvious that once she learned everything she had missed out on learning by not attending school as a child. She had a hunger, a deep and serious hunger for knowledge. She wanted to learn and she was fortunate to have people in her path who encouraged that. Professors who took her under their wing. The bishop at her college church. People who pushed her to continue learning, to discard the psychotic ideas of her father and form her own conclusions.
I can't imagine how hard that was, especially when she attempted to right the wrongs of her past by speaking up about the abusiveness of her older brother. Especially when speaking her truth, cost her a relationship with her parents and sister.
I think the hardest moment for me was when Tara's brother accused her of being pregnant. This poor girl who had barely let a boy hold her hand. Whose mother had been training her to midwife, yet never explained to her how someone becomes pregnant. This girl who thought she was a whore because she put on lip gloss and her brother started calling her that to shame her.
This memoir broke my heart. It broke my heart but it also brought to mind important topics, such as education and how learning truly should be. Victim blaming and how easy it is to refuse to believe a girl because they're "being too emotional" etc. That we are all ignorant of things we have not been taught. And that abstinence only is the stupidest policy anyone has ever come up with.
Most importantly and ironically, as seems to so often happen with me and my books. It further pushed home something I had been needing to realize. That too often we internalize other people's voices. Tara legitimately thought she was a whore. She thought she was crazy, she thought she was a monster. Not because she was any of those things, but because that is what her family, people she trusted. Labeled her as. She trusted them and didn't know different so she internalized it. Their voices became her voice. Their narrative became her narrative until the day she was finally able to recognize their crazy for what it was and reject their reality for her own.
Side note, I fell down a little bit of a rabbit hole while pulling a picture of the book for this blog. It seems her Mom wrote a book recanting hers. I don't think I am personally going to read it because after reading a comparison that mentioned a lot of the neglect and the abuse by her brother was an actual problem I don't think I'll believe a word her Mom says and might just puke instead. But for anyone wanting both sides of the story it's there.
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