Do you think you are smart enough to go to Harvard? What if you never had formal education? Everyone who isn’t lying to themselves would say no. But the book Educated would prove you wrong. Educated follows the true story of Tara Westover, a girl who did that very thing. Tara Westover was born the youngest of seven children in a house in Idaho surrounded by a serene mountain and a junkyard. Tara’s family were extremely strict Mormons, who were seen as crazy by almost everyone in the nearest town, which was predominantly Mormon. Tara’s father was the source of their ways; he believed they were one of the few righteous Mormon families following the correct life of God’s teaching, and everyone else was evil gentiles. He believed the government was the source of most evil and indoctrination, which among many, meant avoiding hospitals no matter the cost, attempting to have his children undocumented, and not placing his children in school. Tara endured extreme physical and mental abuse by her parents and siblings, most notably by her brother Shawn. Educated shows how slowly Tara starts to question the highly damaging lies her father fed her that she kept as truth for her entire life. Eventually, she decides to go against her father’s will and attend college. This was a hard task as she had never been to public school and her mother had failed at homeschooling her. After a lot of studying, however, she got a good enough score on the ACT to attend BYU. There she slowly learned how little she understood of the world. She was miles behind her peers in knowledge but had an extreme work ethic and natural smarts, and she eventually earned a scholarship to Cambridge University in London, then went on to get a Ph.D. at Harvard. Through her academic journey, she learned more about the world and became fluently aware of the abuse she faced in her childhood. Educated ends with Tara walking through the struggles of choosing to remove her family from her life, and the immense unexpected challenges she faces through the process. Educated is jammed packed with things I could write pages about. It makes it hard to write about how the book made me think as a whole without further focusing on one specific idea. One of these parts was the way it talks about Tara’s father’s mental health. When you think of someone with a mental illness, you immediately think of the effects it has on their life. But rarely is the first thought on how profusely it affects the lives of the people close to the person with a mental illness. It is clear that Tara’s father has some sort of mental illness. Tara spoke to many professionals and concluded that it could be bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, but he never took any tests so he was never diagnosed. Tara and her family's lives were completely different because of Tara's father. Tara wrestles with the idea of hating her dad. She hated the way he raised her and the struggles he caused her later in life. But since she believes her dad has a mental illness, does she hate her dad, or the illness? She tries to see her dad empathetically and instead of hating him for what he did, pity him for the delusion he is in. In the end, she decided to remove her dad from his life, as he was significantly detrimental to her mental well-being. This really made me think about balancing the sacrifice of some of our own well-being to help others, while also prioritizing your own mental well-being. Educated has made me realize how significantly someone’s background determines their personality. Before Tara went to college, most of everything she knew came from her father. Her thoughts and actions were completely different before she went to college than after. In the book, she doesn’t describe this change as normal growth, but as her actually changing into a different person. This book has significantly changed how I look at people and how they act. It doesn’t make me judge them for their background and make assumptions about what they are like based on it, instead, I find myself imagining what it is like to be in their situation. This greatly helps me understand why they do what they do. For example, one of my closest friends is the oldest sibling, with one middle school sister and two elementary brothers. I am the youngest sibling with an older brother in college. This isn’t a very big difference, but I can notice its effects on our personalities. My friend is the first child of his parents to go to high school, so everything seems a lot more stressful for them as it is all new. Meanwhile, my parents have already gone through the process of having a kid in high school, so they know what they are doing. Freshmen year was a lot harder for him than for me because he went in not knowing any of the upperclassmen, while a lot of the juniors and seniors knew me since a lot of them were friends with my brother and had been coming to my house every week for years. There are plenty of other examples of how this simple difference actually affects our lives and personality a lot. Recognizing this helps me to be a better friend as I am able to better understand why he may do some things differently, so I’m not quick to tell him that he’s wrong and I’m right. Educated helped me build empathy by showing how someone’s decisions may seem wrong to me, but in reality, their actions are just a byproduct of their circumstances. By Liam Chamberlain
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AuthorSTenth grade students at Decorah High School share how they're reading outside of their own experiences and how it has changed them. Categories
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November 2022
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