By Gary Topping–
It’s a familiar story: a kid from a poor family frugally gathers funds from baby sitting, grocery bagging, and such odd jobs to pay for her first year of college. From there, with a good GPA, she can get scholarships, grants and summer jobs to get the rest of the way through. In fact, it’s my own story.
It is also Tara Westover’s story as recounted in her astonishing new autobiography, Educated: A Memoir. But while my college education was supported by twelve years in excellent public schools and encouraged by a supportive family, Westover started several laps behind. The youngest child in a family of Mormon survivalists in rural Idaho, she had never sat in a classroom until her freshman year at Brigham Young University. She was not even home schooled, other than basic reading and writing, nor had she ever visited a doctor, a hospital, or a dentist. Medical care consisted of dubious herbal potions and essential oils concocted by her mother. She had no birth certificate until she was nine. Her father regarded public schools as agents of socialist propaganda and the federal government as a conspiracy of Illuminati. The first order of business to him was to stockpile food, fuel and weapons in preparation for the End Time and Armageddon.
How, then, did she even get into college in the first place? She simply scrounged textbooks in various disciplines and an ACT study guide, with which she got a high enough score to get into BYU. Even then it was tough sledding. She embarrassed herself and her classmates by asking in class what the Holocaust was. She started reading Les Miserables because one of her friends was reading it and she thought that must be the kind of thing college students read, but she found she could not distinguish between the fictional character Jean Valjean and the real-life Napoleon; she had never heard of either one.
In the end, BYU served her well. Compassionate and nourishing professors, coupled with a whip-lashed and health-damaging work discipline of her own, got her through, and even on to fellowships at Cambridge University and Harvard, culminating with a Ph.D. from Cambridge.
It took a heavy toll on her family life, though. Her father concluded that she had fallen under the control of the Devil and harassment continued from her viciously abusive older brother. She kept returning to Idaho to try to mend relations with the family, but the differences and misunderstandings only grew. Two of her brothers had also escaped and gotten educations, and she remained close to them, but relations with the rest of the family deteriorated to almost complete alienation.
One of the many things that impress me about the book is her attitude toward the Mormon faith of her youth. The book is about education, not Mormonism, she warns us at the outset, and in fact part of her doctoral dissertation dealt with Mormon social thought. Her dad’s version of Mormonism, she learned, was a “lunacy” (her term) and recognized as such even by members of her ward. Her book gives no evidence that she has ever repudiated her faith or become anything but a practicing Mormon, though others would have found ample reason to leave. It is a good lesson for all of us, not to judge Mormonism by its wacky survivalists or polygamists, nor Catholicism by the child-abusing priests, nor Islam by a group of vicious radicals who flew airplanes into skyscrapers. Tara Westover has paid her dues, and it behooves us to pay attention to what she is saying.
