From Scrap Yard to Harvard: Where School Can Take You
Can you imagine what it would be like to begin your education at age 17, in a college classroom?
I spent every minute of my Christmas plane ride to Wisconsin absorbed in Tara Westover’s reality, reading her NY Times best-selling memoir Educated. Tara is raised in a survivalist Mormon family in the mountains of Idaho and forbidden to attend school. Instead she is forced to work in her father’s scrap yard, and help with her mother’s midwife and herbalist pursuits. Yet Tara finds a way to independently study enough SAT prep material to score in the top 20%, and somehow gets accepted into Brigham Young University without any official schooling.
She moves on to even more incredible achievements—after graduating magna cum laude from BYU, she’s awarded a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and an MPhil from Trinity College at Cambridge. Next, she is a visiting fellow at Harvard, and finally she returns to Cambridge where she receives her PhD in history.
While all of this is fascinating, what captivated me even more was the personal transformation that Tara undergoes as she walks the tightrope between her new, educated world, and her dark and dangerous past.
There were a couple of big ideas that this memoir had me pondering at 30,000 feet.
1. A College Education Can Empower Women Trapped in Oppressive, Even Violent Lives.
Tara spends the first 17 years of her life in a strict Mormon household, hearing and seeing repeatedly that women belong serving men in the home. In her teenage years, she is attacked repeatedly by a violent older brother who calls her a whore, while twisting her wrists behind her back and shoving her head into the toilet. If she is lucky enough to escape this attack, Shawn grabs her by the hair, yanking her head back as she tries to escape. The most enduring emotional pain comes from her mother ignoring the attacks, often from the other room, so that Tara assumes she is worthy of this treatment.
She experiences no alternative reality until she goes to college and graduate school, where it’s clear that women are treated equally to men, and she learns about Feminism for the first time. When she visits home for holidays, she crosses back into a world where she is weak and vulnerable—until one dramatic day.
Her brother threatens her again, and you watch her self-image shift right in front of you on the page in this transformative passage:
“I had often locked myself in this bathroom after Shawn let me go. I would move the panels until I saw my face three times, then I would glare at each one, contemplating what Shawn had said and what he had made me say, until it all began to feel true instead of just something I had said to make the pain stop. And here I was still, and here was the mirror. The same face, repeated in the same three panels. Except it wasn’t … It was something behind her eyes, something in the set of her jaw—a hope or belief or conviction—that a life is not a thing unalterable.”
This was such a powerful experience for Tara, creating a permanent change in her self-worth and emboldening her to live a new kind of life she never would have had without her education.
2. The First Year of College Can Be Really Hard, Especially for First-Generation Students. They Deserve Additional Support to Succeed.
This is embarrassing to admit, but I struggled a bit in my first semester at University of Wisconsin, Madison. The size alone was intimidating, surrounded by nearly 40,000 other students, I felt a bit invisible and overwhelmed. Just walking a mile to class every morning was an adjustment from living a car-centric life in high school. My “A’s” in english, music and art helped me get accepted to the University, so taking an upper-level science course my first semester probably wasn’t the best idea.
I made it through all of these issues and went on to love UW Madison, but reading Educated brought back these memories. Tara’s situation was extreme—having never been to school at all she struggled socially to fit it, alienating herself with questions like, “I don’t know this word, what does it mean?” when referring to the word Holocaust. But I’ve read similar stories of struggle, particularly from kids coming from low-income families, and we’ve heard the statistics reporting that first-generation college students have a lower graduation rate than students with college-educated parents.
So why not offer free and mandatory counseling for first-generation college students? Or to every college freshman?
Most colleges and universities offer some sort of counseling services already, and I don’t think we need any more evidence that freshmen and first-generation students could be more successful with a structured counseling program.
Needless to say I highly recommend reading Educated. It was one of the most unique and well-written memoirs I’ve ever read. If you need more encouragement, it’s #3 on the NY Times non-fiction best seller list!