Educated: Week 1 Discussion

Please use a different color font for answers.

Norms

Make a list of your group norms below.

1. Be respectful
2. Be productive
3. Everyone must participate
4. Don’t take up too much time

Roles

List any absent group members:

● Facilitator: Laura
● Recorder: Ben
● Prioritizer: Laura
● Connector: Kaleo
● Questioner: Andrew

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?

- The quote is explaining that it takes time to process how you feel, you do not completely
understand how you feel until you have time to process
- As time passes by, you react differently to situations you experience in the moment, you gain
experience and have different thought processes when you look back
- You can see how your past experience have shaped who you are now because you can see the
effects they had on your life up until that point
- This is her starting point of the book, it starts her memoir and is a reminder that she is looking
back with experience, distance, and time between her present self and her past self

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?

- The family gives the mountain so much power, similar to how they gave a lot of power to
doctrine and scripture
- Similar to the mountain, the father has the majority of the power in the family and decides who
goes to school and how the family lives, what technologies they are allowed to have
 - Symbolizes the fact that their life is very jagged like the mountain, it is unrefined and untouched
by modern technology
- The main character is used to having an overbearing presence in her life and she has grown up
with this and learned to be comforted by it even though it is unhealthy in the long run,
preventing her from getting proper medical attention and education

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?

- The gun fight serves as a turning point for the family, it becomes the point where the father
starts referring to this story and using fear in order to control what the family does
- The dad changes the story to fit his own agenda and perspective, interpreting it in a way to
justify him demanding that his family act in a certain way
- This serves as the point where the father descends into paranoia and conspiracy, where he
begins to not trust anything about the government even thought he most likely has a twisted
view of the story

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?

- The father fears and mistrusts education as he thinks that education is the way the government
manipulates children and their citizens
- Another reason the father mistrusts religion is because he needs to feel power, he needs to feel
that he has control over his children and he attributes education to the destabilization of his
family hierarchy
- When Tyler leaves, it is the end of the father’s reign over the family, it is the final point where
the father cannot rely on his children anymore, his vision of family self reliance is broken as this
is the point where he needs to start looking outside the family to make a living, to sustain the
family
- This event restructures the family, the mother and the younger children suddenly need to take
on more responsibility, which the father hates because he is traditional in his ideas in the roles of
the mother and children

5. How does the mother’s responsibilities and business undermine the father’s ideas of gender roles and
cause him to change his perspective on them?

- In general, the mother’s financial responsibilities make the father prioritize his mistrust of the
government over his ideas about roles in the family
- When the mother takes on the role of the midwife, the father is disapproving until he sees that
he is able to manipulate the mother and the rest of the family because he thinks that the
mother’s job undermines the government and the fact that the role his wife plays as a midwife is
a non medical and proper role for a woman in his eyes
Summary: Overall, this portion of the book reflects how the father is able to manipulate the
family. It focuses on the control that the father has over the family and how this hold affects each
of the children and the mother. While the father may think that this is genuinely protecting the
family, it is an unhealthy relationship and balance of power between the father and the rest of
the family. Furthermore, the unhealthy situation in which the family finds themselves exemplifies
the harmful effects of not having education or your own, firm beliefs.