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A review by dessuarez
Educated by Tara Westover
inspiring
reflective
tense
5.0
First, let me say this: Tara is a brilliant storyteller and an expert essayist. This has to be the most coherent and well-written memoir that I have read in my life. It strikes the perfect balance between objectively stating events that have happened (with proper vetting and everything, footnotes, and acknowledging gaps and discrepancies where they exist - which we learn later is the result of her training as an intellectual historian) while still making space for the subjective experience of having lived such a hard and unbelievable life in a way that neither minimizes its impact nor lashes out at all the damage that it had wrought.
Only in the hands of a master essayist can topics so controversial and polarized be discussed with such care and respect, without excusing them or being an apologist. Tara talks about religion, domestic abuse, racism, genocide, feminism - topics that, if you do so much as use the wrong syntax, would result in so much contempt and could even get you 'cancelled', so it's amazing that never in this book did I ever want to stop listening to her, despite how problematic many of the opinions she shares from various characters in the book including herself are.
I have a lot of takeaways from this book. I was going to share about my own childhood in my small Philippine province, growing up with a mother who was a teacher and a father whose approach to learning was to hyperfixate on something until he learned it; I was going to speak at length about how I struggled with a similar dissonance when I learned that, in fact, my parents did not know everything; and how, similarly, I desperately needed to leave my town and go to university so that I could learn correctly (only to find out that what we know to be true now may not have always been true and may cease to be true in the future, and that even esteemed scholars from my great academic institution also did not know everything, that simply no one does or can); and similarly, how I realized that my life-changing education had alienated me from my own family, and that that was the cost of being free to think outside of their sphere or thought...
But I think that conversation is for my therapist.
There is something more important that I want to discuss instead. It had always irked me when in media (and honestly, in real life) poor people like Tara's family would be depicted as ignorant and incapable of the same level of reflection that rich people were capable of, and that is why they contribute to the exacerbation of climate change, the reinforcement of sexism and other injustices, and vote for the wrong presidential candidates, and so on.
I had never fully found a good argument against that that wasn't just "you are an elitist piece of shit," and the material argument that when you spend the whole day worried about where you're gonna get the money to feed yourself or your family tomorrow, where the hell could you spare a single thought to injustice, feminism, etcetera?
After reading this book, I formed a third argument. I gained a concrete and vivid understanding that in the end, regardless of the facts, what gets people to believe in anything is other people. Why? Because when you're poor, your family, your community is your lifeline, literally. The logical response to precarity is community, and a natural behavior that nourishes belongingness in the community is to conform to it - i.e. what your community believes, you will believe, not always because you were forced to do it, but just because of saturation - e.g. you see that both your mother believes in x, so you also believe in x, because why the hell shouldn't you?
And so my point is: what we perceive to be the ignorance of poor people is not exactly ignorance, but communal respect and care. Having grown up in a poor, small town, I have seen (and have been so annoyed by) the kind of internal reflections that have to be done to execute that kind of hospitality. We cannot say that poor people lack the mental capacity to reflect like richer or more educated people reflect. They do. Maybe not to a Tara Westover level but they do. It's just a different sphere of life that they are concerned with: the sphere of life that decides whether or not, if their house burns down tomorrow, will their kids have somewhere to sleep; or if a calamity hits (which it always does nowadays) will someone look for them in the rubble?
Regardless of the harmful results that this behavior (which some may call conformity while others simply hospitality) has created for our larger society, we have to acknowledge that the root of most bad things could have been well-meaning. In that way, we can start looking for solutions that would not compromise the sense of security that is provided by our communities.
In Tara's case, she had to be estranged from half of her family in order to stand for what's right, because half of her family needed the financial and social security provided by their parents in order to live. The other half that stuck with her could only do so because at the very least they did not rely on their parents financially.
I want to live in a world where you can stand for what's right without your basic needs being on the line. And since I am no Tara Westover and I am a flat out commie I will say it up front here. What I mean, explicity, is: public housing should be free, public education should be free, and health care should be free. I believe that when we free people from precarity, we effectively loosen their desire to conform to beliefs that they know to be wrong, or that at least it would be easier to educate them and for that education to actually result into action.
I believe this because I believe this. I came up with the belief myself! (1) (2)
(1) after reading this whole book and hundreds of others
(2) and also after actually going into precarious communities
Only in the hands of a master essayist can topics so controversial and polarized be discussed with such care and respect, without excusing them or being an apologist. Tara talks about religion, domestic abuse, racism, genocide, feminism - topics that, if you do so much as use the wrong syntax, would result in so much contempt and could even get you 'cancelled', so it's amazing that never in this book did I ever want to stop listening to her, despite how problematic many of the opinions she shares from various characters in the book including herself are.
I have a lot of takeaways from this book. I was going to share about my own childhood in my small Philippine province, growing up with a mother who was a teacher and a father whose approach to learning was to hyperfixate on something until he learned it; I was going to speak at length about how I struggled with a similar dissonance when I learned that, in fact, my parents did not know everything; and how, similarly, I desperately needed to leave my town and go to university so that I could learn correctly (only to find out that what we know to be true now may not have always been true and may cease to be true in the future, and that even esteemed scholars from my great academic institution also did not know everything, that simply no one does or can); and similarly, how I realized that my life-changing education had alienated me from my own family, and that that was the cost of being free to think outside of their sphere or thought...
But I think that conversation is for my therapist.
There is something more important that I want to discuss instead. It had always irked me when in media (and honestly, in real life) poor people like Tara's family would be depicted as ignorant and incapable of the same level of reflection that rich people were capable of, and that is why they contribute to the exacerbation of climate change, the reinforcement of sexism and other injustices, and vote for the wrong presidential candidates, and so on.
I had never fully found a good argument against that that wasn't just "you are an elitist piece of shit," and the material argument that when you spend the whole day worried about where you're gonna get the money to feed yourself or your family tomorrow, where the hell could you spare a single thought to injustice, feminism, etcetera?
After reading this book, I formed a third argument. I gained a concrete and vivid understanding that in the end, regardless of the facts, what gets people to believe in anything is other people. Why? Because when you're poor, your family, your community is your lifeline, literally. The logical response to precarity is community, and a natural behavior that nourishes belongingness in the community is to conform to it - i.e. what your community believes, you will believe, not always because you were forced to do it, but just because of saturation - e.g. you see that both your mother believes in x, so you also believe in x, because why the hell shouldn't you?
And so my point is: what we perceive to be the ignorance of poor people is not exactly ignorance, but communal respect and care. Having grown up in a poor, small town, I have seen (and have been so annoyed by) the kind of internal reflections that have to be done to execute that kind of hospitality. We cannot say that poor people lack the mental capacity to reflect like richer or more educated people reflect. They do. Maybe not to a Tara Westover level but they do. It's just a different sphere of life that they are concerned with: the sphere of life that decides whether or not, if their house burns down tomorrow, will their kids have somewhere to sleep; or if a calamity hits (which it always does nowadays) will someone look for them in the rubble?
Regardless of the harmful results that this behavior (which some may call conformity while others simply hospitality) has created for our larger society, we have to acknowledge that the root of most bad things could have been well-meaning. In that way, we can start looking for solutions that would not compromise the sense of security that is provided by our communities.
In Tara's case, she had to be estranged from half of her family in order to stand for what's right, because half of her family needed the financial and social security provided by their parents in order to live. The other half that stuck with her could only do so because at the very least they did not rely on their parents financially.
I want to live in a world where you can stand for what's right without your basic needs being on the line. And since I am no Tara Westover and I am a flat out commie I will say it up front here. What I mean, explicity, is: public housing should be free, public education should be free, and health care should be free. I believe that when we free people from precarity, we effectively loosen their desire to conform to beliefs that they know to be wrong, or that at least it would be easier to educate them and for that education to actually result into action.
I believe this because I believe this. I came up with the belief myself! (1) (2)
(1) after reading this whole book and hundreds of others
(2) and also after actually going into precarious communities