I don’t often read memoirs (or non-fiction more generally) for pleasure, preferring to keep business and pleasure separate, but I had heard nothing but good — rapturous really — things about Tara Westover’s Educated and decided to check it out (of my amazing local library). The book vividly retells Westover’s life as a child growing up in an isolated family in Idaho, the daughter of an abusive father whose paranoia drives him to reject any interaction with the government, including, most importantly, public education. As we follow Westover’s path to college at Brigham Young University and then onward to Cambridge on a Gates Fellowship and then to a Ph.D., we witness in gross detail the mental and physical abuse that Westover suffered not simply before she “escaped” but as she worked to figure out just what escaping meant to her. Indeed, the book is particularly evocative and complex in the way it gets the reader into Westover’s head, underscoring her own doubts, struggles and, most powerfully and disturbingly, complicity in the cycles of abuse that so defined her family. In this respect, I can only compare it favorably with another memoir of overcoming struggle in order to achieve an education, Undocumented, which sometimes felt like it was effacing complexity in favor of narrative-pacing. Undocumented felt, for lack of a better term, teleological. Educated underscores how difficult is it to escape one’s past, how even as we are succeeding we may feel like we aren’t or don’t deserve to, and, most of all, that we sometimes are our worst enemies. Educated is often uncertain about its own conclusions, the memories it presents, and the finality of its story.
Obviously, the book has a great deal to say about Westover herself, as well as the social forces that created the conditions for the paranoia, mental illness, and misogyny that gave rise to her particular circumstances (in this respect, I highly recommend listening to the podcast Bundyville as a complementary story about the kind of Mormon fundamentalism that Westover’s father subscribed to). It also has a great deal to say about how one becomes educated in the first place and the complicated ways her education forces her to reevaluate her identity. Westover, it is worth noting, did not simply “choose” to go to school; she had to be pushed. Reading it on the cusp of a new school year, however, cannot help but reverse the analysis somewhat: to focus on some of the people around her, especially her teachers.
Westover arrives at BYU as if entering an entirely different world. She does not possess the social cues we so often think are just “normal.” She does not follow basic hygiene, such as washing one’s hands after going to the bathroom or showering every day. She can neither afford, nor does she want to, dress the way the other girls dressed. More to the point, she does not know how to read a syllabus. She does not know what the textbook is for. She does not know, before entering her Western Civilization class, what the Holocaust was. She asks, but everyone assumes that she had just offered a joke in horrendously bad taste (pg. 157). Everyone around her, in other words, assumed that she knew all these things already and that it wasn’t their job to help her learn them. Of course, she eventually does, but that moment in class should remain indelible for anyone working in higher education, especially at scholars with diverse and diversifying student bodies.
I once had a student who didn’t know who Hitler was. It was my first semester teaching at the University of Southern Mississippi and I, quite frankly, did not know what to say or do in response. All I did was ask if she had read the assigned textbook readings. When the student said no, I sent her out of my office, and told her to come back after doing so. I was angry. I had some reason for being suspicious of this ignorance. A colleague who heard the exchange patted me on the back for not letting the student get away with their laziness. What I didn’t realize or want to recognize is that what I read as laziness was actually ignorance. This was a student in my office. It was an opportunity for a discussion. But I let it get away from me. I never saw her again. I failed that student.
I have been fortunate to have friends and colleagues who have introduced me to the concept of the “hidden curriculum,” those set of expectations and norms that we often assume students will already know and will be able to follow, usually on the basis of their prior schooling or just what academia is. Failure to follow these implicit expectations can put students at significant disadvantages, not only because they will have more difficulty navigating college, but because they won’t know how to take advantage of opportunities that are available to them. To give just one example, my late policy for written assignments was always more implicit than explicit. The syllabus said that I would accept late papers with a penalty, but almost without fail if a student asked for an extension before the deadline, I would grant it. That policy is now explicit in the syllabus so that all students have that same opportunity. This is why elite schools are holding classes on navigating college. This is why professors are posting YouTube videos on what office hours are. These things are not obvious unless we make them so.
Westover’s encounter with higher education ended with her earning a Ph.D. in history. But what about other students whose first moments are met with the same kind of dismissal she faced at BYU? Do they also succeed? Some most likely do, but others undoubtedly don’t. One reading of the book might emphasize how Westover’s professors eventually discovered that she was “special.” But read from the perspective of the people who encountered Westover, we can see how easy it was to dismiss that very possibility. I don’t think that Westover — for all her success — is special. Rather, she was another student facing us on the first day of class. Educated reminds of us of our responsibility to acknowledge the diversity of our students in ways that are both hidden and open and facilitate their ability to take advantage of their time taking college courses. We can’t blame students for failing to do so if we simply dismiss them out of hand.