From the mountains to Cambridge: Educated
How can education change a person’s life, completely and permanently? How can a person escape from the
restrictions of her family and discover her true self? You’ll find the answer as you explore the magnificent
book, Educated.
Tara Westover, the author of this marvelous book, describes her education as transformation,
metamorphosis, falsity, and betrayal. Born and raised in the remote, uninhabited mountains, Tara first
stepped into a classroom at the age of seventeen. Her dad was a survivalist, an extreme Mormon, avoiding
and fighting against the government, which, as he claimed, was unreliable and deceptive. Believing the End
of the Day was around the corner, he crazily went out of his way to prepare for it, so they’d be the only
household self-sufficient when that horrible day really came. His faith was so strong and unshakable that no
one in the family ever dared to challenge him, especially in such a family that was isolated from mainstream
society. In her early childhood, Tara was brought up in the junkyards, and her only access to knowledge was
from homeschooling by her mom.
However, Tara’s thirst for knowledge grew day by day. Some of her siblings broke with their dad and went
to college. The process of how Tara made every effort to convince her parents and study on her own to get
herself qualified for university deeply moved me. Her courage was remarkable. She dared to breach her
father’s strong will to acquire an education and made such a decision which may lead her to cut the bonds
with her family forever. She applied to the college anyway, though she was only seventeen by then, and had
never received any public education as her peers did. Thankfully, she was finally accepted by BYU and
started her life in college. The days in college were also tough, however. She failed every quiz and exam,
never knowing that she was supposed to read the textbook thoroughly to learn. She was even under great
pressure to pay tuition fees to continue studying, while a full scholarship required a full GPA, which seemed
impossible for her. What’s worse, her weird living habits and deep-rooted Mormonism made her a misfit.
Under such great stress, she managed to sail through the difficult times and got a half scholarship in the end.
She was then given a chance to study at Cambridge as an exchange student. Her performance and her
distinctive perspective impressed her professor dramatically, who then wrote a powerful recommendation
letter for her to complete her doctorate at Cambridge and Stanford. Tara even received Gate’s scholarship in
Cambridge.
Even then, her struggle with her family never ended. Tara’s dad considered her studying abroad in the UK as
a betrayal of her family and her religious beliefs. Nevertheless, she finally felt a sense of belonging on the
campus of Cambridge, when she learned the concept of negative liberty and positive liberty, when she
learned that “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.” She
started her essay on family, morality, and social science in Anglo-Amerian cooperative thought, but things
just went bad. She was deeply trapped in her family relationships: she was betrayed by her closest brothers
and sisters, and was secluded from other family members by her dad. It took her a long time to go over this
desperate period in which her studies halted and her mental health condition worsened.
In the end, she returned to her hometown but refused to visit her parents, who were already rich and build a
massive fort. Tara made a life-turning decision: to break off the father-daughter ties. She has been educated:
to have the courage to leave her hometown to quest for further education; to leave her strict and stubborn
family and find her true self on her own; to stand on her own feet, despite the unbearable pressure from her
family and schools.
“You can call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal.”
“I call it an education.”