Educated: Week 1 Discussion

Please use a different color font for answers.

Norms

Make a list of your group norms below.

- Don’t interrupt
- Listen closely to others.
- Answer the questions, don’t rant
- No excessive Bullying
- Keep it civil
- Form good arguments
- No shirt, no socks, no talking.
- No loitering
- 🤯
- No Jaywalking
- Thou shalt not kill
- Right to a lawyer
- You musnt do illegal activities

Roles

List any absent group members:

● Facilitator: Joshua Mecham

● Recorder: Teya Snowder
● Connector: Rishab Ramalingam
● Questioner: JT Downard

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?
- You can get a different view/perspective when you look back on a memory
- New ideas
- New context/background information
- Especially since she was a kid, she can realize exactly what was going on
- Knows what the real world is like
- Emotion hits you after the situation
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?

- Isolated and separated from society

- Rural, they don’t have a phone
- Shows distrust for society
- Their culture and ideas are isolated as well
- Don’t conform to society’s norm
- Changes family structure, hierarchy
-

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?

- They compare themselves to other family, stereotypes

- Further makes them distrust gov and society
- They are expected to do the same actions as the other family
- Could be seen as inspiration
- They’re viewed as being radical or extreme paranoid
- Makes them more fearful
- Family feels called out or represented

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?
- Father things education is “abomination to God”
- Goes against his morals
- Doesn’t want ehm to learn contrary beliefs
- Father doesn't wanna lose control
- Doesn’t want other children to follow footsteps
- Makes him more paranoid and radical
- Lack of education keeps them from questioning his authority
- Makes father’s work harder because of less workers
- Father sees it as a personal attack
- Plays the victim
- Makes him more strict on other kids
- Tara feels like Tyler is leaving her
5. How do the choices of others (within and outside the family) affect the mindset of the father
throughout the book “Educated” by Tara Westover.
- Becomes stricter on younger kids
- As Tyler leaves it radicalizes him more
- Stories such as the Ruby Ridge standoff (Weaver family) scare him even more
- Stories in the Bible make him more paranoid that he’s not doing enough
- The opposition with the thoughts of the grandmother makes him hold a stronger
position

SUMMARY:
Westover looked back on her childhood with her new perspective and saw how her
father was affected by internal and external factors, which increasingly changed his
mindset. The father became more strict on his children’s education especially when they
left the homestead to go to school. He felt personally offended when his family chose
society over him and the gospel.