Educated: Week 1 Discussion

Please use a different color font for answers.

Norms

Make a list of your group norms below.

- One speaker at a time
- You need to have the speaking marker to speak
- Gage is hilarious
- Dereks fast
- Humzahs amazing
- Abigails cool
- Fatimas great

Roles

List any absent group members:

● Facilitator: Derik
● Recorder: Abbey
● Prioritizer: Gage
● Connector: Humzah
● Questioner: Fatima

Notes

1. Educated starts with an epigraph from Virginia Woolf: “The past is beautiful because one never
realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don’t have complete emotions about the
present, only the past.” What do you think Woolf meant by this? Why do you think Tara Westover chose
to begin her memoir this way?
In the present, we don’t have to understand our emotions because later we get to really take in how our
emotions influence us. Her entire book is her expanding on her past. In her childhood, she didn’t
understand that her father was bipolar, her father starts to make sense to her. She also talks about how
her siblings knew her father, she didn’t. She also felt the emotion of falling behind when her brother
wanted to pursue education. This prompted her in the future to ask her father if she could get an
education.
2. In the first pages of Educated, we are introduced to the mountain in rural Idaho where the Westover
family lives, described as a dark, beautiful, and commanding form in a “jagged little patch of Idaho.” How
does this setting inform the family’s experience?
It allows them to be different because of the isolation that occurs from living there. She talks about the
mountain being unforgiving to strangers and beautiful to those who know it. They always come back to
the mountain, even talking about it when they are away.

3. We are also introduced early in the book to the standoff at Ruby Ridge, a 1992 gunfight between FBI
agents and U.S. marshals and a heavily armed family on an isolated homestead. How does this incident
cast a shadow over the Westover parents and children, and the survivalism that characterizes their
upbringing?
She talks about how it is what made her father go over the edge. He wants to run into the hills and not
get trapped into the home. Everything about that story influences the way they live. It also made the
father more firm in his beliefs, questioning the government and preparing for the FBI. This is what the
author is trying to make people avoid.

4. In Chapter 5, Westover’s brother Tyler announces that he’s going to college, something none of her
other siblings have done. Why does Westover’s father, Gene, object to formalized education? How does
Tyler’s leaving have an impact on Westover?
Education takes them away from religion and what they are learning at home. He even believes that the
illuminati is infiltrating BYU. In some ways, it’s about the control that he has over his children. If they get
an education, he’s worried that he’ll lose his children. Tara and Tyler started bonding over music and
even after he left, she started also trying to learn on her own with textbooks and the computer. This
made the dad even more mad because he doesn’t want her to follow in Tyler’s footsteps.

5. In Tara’s family, their father has tried to create a household in which religion and daith play a mojor
role. Although many of the older siblings in Tara’s family have left whether it was for education or just
being on their own. Why do you think this has been the case and will this pattern continue as the rest of
the children grow up and become more independent?

He was creating a lifestyle that had a fear of everything else to keep them in this one place so
that they would stick with the religion. The beliefs aren’t faith based, it was just something
situational. It was all about control which is why he didn’t want to send them off to school.