STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK
Tara Westover never stepped foot in a classroom until she was 17.
But on Saturday at Ketchum’s Community Library the author of “Educated” told how the education she got as she pursued a PhD in intellectual history and political thought from Cambridge had remade her into a different person.
“In education you can choose to remake yourself or be remade by others,” she told 200 people filling the lecture hall.
To take an active role in your education is to remake yourself, she added. To take a passive role, accepting what sometimes is propaganda of others, is to allow yourself to be remade by others.
Westover’s appearance at Community Library has been the buzz of the valley for months. And, though the girl from the southeastern Idaho’s Clifton has been the darling of NPR and magazine scribes, it was only the second talk she’s given since her book came out.
The library issued reservations for 200 seats within moments of offering them online in July. And when 200 more seats were opened for a second talk, they filled within moments, as well.
Even more people watched her talk via Livestream at the Hailey Public Library, a library in Travis County, Texas, and on their laptops at home.
“We were among the first to get her because we asked,” said Library Director Jenny Emery Davidson, who fell love with Westover’s book after reading it in February. “I’ve been thrilled to recognize the book’s trajectory—we have many copies and they’ve circulated well over a hundred times. And the whole community can celebrate that it emerged from our state of Idaho.”
“Educated” describes Westover’s childhood under survivalist Mormon parents who were preparing for the End of Days. She and her six older siblings learned the value of work in their father’s junkyard. And she would often accompany her mother, a midwife and herbalist who homeschooled her children, into the woods looking for plants her mother could turn into medicines.
“We were the definition of free range kids—we had horses, goats and a junkyard jungle gym.” said Westover, who was celebrating her 32nd birthday.
Westover didn’t see the insides of a school or a doctor’s office until after she taught herself enough algebra to gain admission to Brigham Young University. She believes the seed for wanting something more than what she knew growing up was planted when her brother played “Phantom of the Opera” for her when she was nine.
“It was pretty close to transcendent,” said Westover, who recently moved to New York from the United Kingdom. “I loved singing in church. I loved the hymns we sang. But this was something new and I realized someone in the world had to teach people how to do that. That was the first time I realized that there might be something worth leaving the mountains for.”
Charting a different future was not without growing pains.
“I asked what the Holocaust was in class, as I had never heard of it. I don’t recommend doing that, as the other students were appalled,” she said. “After class I went to the computer lab to learn more and I remember leaving realizing that the world was a different place than what I had learned, that something awful had taken place.
“I also learned the depths of my ignorance,” she added.
Similarly, Westover said, she had heard of slavery but never of Civil Rights.
“When I heard Rosa Parks had been arrested for taking a bus seat, I thought she stole a seat. I was trying to figure out how she had done that and what she wanted with an old bus seat, anyway,” she recounted.
Westover said she believes we don’t hear enough of these stories—and that the stories we do hear are often sanitized to reflect what we would like them to be.
“Until I understood the history of our country, I could not understand the role I was playing in it…the role my family played in it,” she said.
She realized the difference her education was making when her father began talking about how the Jewish people were trying to start a world war to consolidate their power, while she and her parents were having dinner during her senior year at college.
“I had always heard what he had to say as if they were words from God,” she said. “But for the first time I realized they were something else.”
Westover realized that her father was quoting from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—something that Adolph Hitler quoted in Mein Kampf, even though it had been discredited as a forgery.
“I knew my father would’ve hated to be quoting Adolf Hitler,” she said.
It was a psychology class that would eventually lead her to being estranged from her parents and some of her siblings.
Her brother, who was 10 years older than her, occasionally pulled her around by her hair, shoving her head in the toilet.
He would then tell her it was a game and that he had no idea he was hurting her. Westover accepted that at first, even writing her brother’s version of events down in her journal, trying to make herself believe it was true.
She refrained from telling her parents, she said, because she didn’t want to chance that they knew but did nothing about it
But after learning about mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, she began talking publicly about her brother’s actions and her parents couldn’t deal with it. She said that she does believe her father believed he was doing the right thing as she was growing up.
“I don’t know if I understand how people can love you and still hurt you,” she said. “I do understand that love can be real and yet sometimes not enough…All that can be said for love is that it persists.”
Westover cautioned the audience that an education is not the same thing as a school. If you stand in a lecture hall, she said, you stand in a school, not in an education.
She also cautioned against putting so much emphasis on job training that things like philosophy are ignored: “I’m grateful for the training in mathematics. But without history and philosophy and the arts, I would not have become a new person.”
“No education can be called good that doesn’t include empathy for those who don’t look like us…for those who don’t think like us,” she added.
Sandra Flattery said she enjoyed Westover’s somewhat self-deprecating sense of humor: “I thought she was a good speaker for her second speech.”
Marcia Liebich said she liked Westover’s admonition that you have to put a lot of effort into education in order to be educated.
“You can go to Harvard or Yale and not come out educated,” she said.
SEE TARA WESTOVER’S SPEECH:
The Community Library will archive the Tara Westover lectures. To see them in the future, go to livestream.com/comlib/tarawestover