Analysis Of Educated: A Memoir, By Tara Westover

In Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover, she is talking about her relationship with education. We are following her journey with it, so the timeline only shows the area where education is a focal point. We start with her at age seven and we end just a couple of years ago, when she receives her PHD from Cambridge. In the beginning of the memoir, Tara “according to the state of Idaho and the federal government, [does] not exist” (xiv). She was born at her house, and her parents never acquire a birth certificate, so she didn’t attend school. “We have never set foot in a classroom” she writes (xiv). We start out and she is giving a brief background to her life. We are told that she lives in the Idaho mountains, she is seven years old at the start of the book, she was born into a survivalist family, and of course, she doesn’t go to school.

When she breaks her leg because she’s working at her dad’s junkyard, it’s because she isn’t at school during the day. When she doesn’t know how to talk to kids her age when she goes to play practice, it’s because she doesn’t go to school. When she was on vacation and got into a car crash that gave her a concussion, she was only able to be on vacation because she didn’t attend school. These stories that we hear don’t seem connected to her journey with education, at first, but as we examine the book we can see the