Educated- book review
Is school really necessary?
We all go to school, take 6 different courses, and go back home to study for our tests. Some of us do good, some of us fail, but who cares? By next year, most of us will probably forget what we learned anyways.
However, after reading Educated, a powerful memoir by Tara Westover, my perspective on school drastically shifted.
Tara is a survivalist with a background completely different from our lives. She never received proper education for sixteen years because of her father's suspicion on the government. She was continuously abused by Shawn, her brother, as well.
At age seventeen, she gets accepted to BYU, and few years later, she earns a PhD in history at Cambridge University. She didn't even know what the Holocaust was at the start!
Nonetheless, during her time there, she learns about her father's bipolar disorder and certain racist terms that Shawn calls her. Understanding how negatively they have affected her life, she takes a bold decision to distance herself from her family and find a new community to belong in.
Her beautifully-crafted story shares us the value of knowledge and school. For her, school is not a place to be tortured, but instead, a place to acquire knowledge of other people's background and personalities and realize more about herself in this world.
After reading her memoir, I slowly became more conscious of how the knowledge I gained from school has impacted my life. It enables me to find a community of kind and supportive friends, just like how it did for Tara, separating me from toxic friendships and helping me become where I am today. I never realized how much more school offered than just stupid equations like the quadratic formula, or the Newton's 2nd law.
Educated is more than just a 330-page narrative of Tara's seemingly unrelatable life. It reveals the powerful connection between self-identity and knowledge that we should all become more aware of.
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