Educated by Tara WestoverMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Mostly it was a really interesting, couldn’t-put-it-down memoir by a person who had a really different life from me.
It also makes you think, per the title, about education, its purpose, etc. The author and two of her brothers ended up with PhDs after having received zero formal schooling before college, and obviously they seem pretty smart and impressive otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to do it, but also it does make you think about why exactly all that K-12 education was necessary. Sure, they had some catching up to do, but they basically managed. Tara self-studied enough trig to get into college, struggled through her college math requirements but passed them, and then never needed advanced math again in her life.
It makes it pretty clear that the real point of K-12 education is socializing kids. The stuff Tara was missing wasn’t stuff like “how to read and analyze a text” (she taught that to herself, as a kid, reading the Bible). It wasn’t anything you need for any job. It was basically all “how to be normal and fit in” in one guise or another, from how to dress to what the Holocaust was and what to say if it comes up in conversation.
And it ultimately made me feel some pretty strong pro-public-school feelings. Certainly most people are wrong about most stuff. But if whatever crazy ideas you’re trying to inculcate in your children can’t survive a little jostling in the marketplace of ideas, that really doesn’t seem like a good sign.
View all my reviews