Tara Westover Quotes

Education is gained and developed by one's life and values. Education is more than just reading textbooks, going to class, and repeating that cycle. Education is life and knowledge. People can gain education through experiences in the real world. Tara Westover, the author of the book Educated, recounts her life's journey from childhood to the present, in doing so she reinforces the theme that education is the key to change.
Tara Westover explains how she uses education to free herself from her family's verbal and physical abuse in order to gain self empowerment. As stated when Tara Westover sees all the hardships she has endured in order to further her education and be able to leave Buck’s Peak. She no longer regards her father as the highest

He does not like it when his children show independence or act as though they might go against him. Which is why Tyler is motivated by his knowledge of the world outside of Buck's Peak once he departs for BYU. In order for Tara to escape her oppressive surroundings, Tyler encourages her to apply to college. Tyler admits in this statement that his father's extreme religiosity served as the foundation for his entire worldview. "There's a world out there, Tara," he said. "And it will look a lot different once Dad is no longer whispering his view of it in your ear." (Pg. 120) Tara westover had studied hard and was able to take the ACT but she had failed the first time but she still continued to study and scored high enough on the ACT to eventually attend BYU, where tara westover had learned the word holocaust “I don't know how long i sat there reading about it, but a some point i’d read enough.”(pg. 157) , and eventually learned about her own ignorance “I leaned back and stared at the ceiling. I suppose i was in shock, but weather it was shock of learning about something so horrific, or the shock of learning about my own

She also realized that she could use her voice and that it was just as strong as her family's. For the first time, Tara has come to realization that she was able to concentrate on her own wants and motivations and design a life for herself at that point.“My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs.”(Pg. 197)
At BYU, Tara Westover learned about bipolar disorder in her psychology class and later realized that her father suffers from it.“This is my father, I wrote in my notes. He's describing dad.” (Pg. 207) Suddenly Tara Westover has earned a Gates cambridge scholarship and earned her PhD at Trinity College Cambridge.
Tara Westover discovered that if she acquires more knowledge, she will be able to escape the verbal and physical abuse she receives from her family. She developed an independent sense of self and the capacity to decide what she wants to be during the arduous process of escaping. She has finally realized that education is about finding one's own voice. Its goal is to give power. “You could call this selfhood many things,” she says at her book’s end. “Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education.” (Pg.