Here is a story that a friend once told me: she just had a really big fight with her parents— the cause is one she no longer remembers— which leads her to pack a bag and leave the house. Not to do anything drastic, just to blow off some steam. She has her schoolbag and heads out the door. As she is driving, she realizes that she completely forgot her phone and wallet. “I had a test the following week, but I just ran away from home. The last thing that should be on my mind is what chapters I have for homework.”

My friend’s story reminded me of when I read Educated by Tara Westover. In an attempt to regain her sense of control and independence, she grabbed onto her schoolwork. It isn’t shocking to believe that school can be one’s annoyance or coping mechanism, just like other avenues such as sports, music: it can as much be one’s favorite pastime as to one’s door to escape. 

But with it being a coping mechanism or an escape, that cultivates an intrinsic motivation to perfect that talent or to learn a difficult concept. My friend viewed her schoolwork differently that day— such as Westover the day she first discovered classical music and opera. That maybe, the purpose of education was not the accumulation of knowledge but the building of intellectual integrity that can advise one to face adversity in different avenues of their lives.

The contents of Educated hold more than Westover’s college life in BYU and Cambridge— the reader learns of the turmoil that surrounds Westover’s survivalist family and where her apathy for traditional schooling stemmed from. 

With so many intellects retelling their childhood as their awakening period for the years of education they knew they were destined to achieve, Westover as a young girl who didn’t understand the concept of education until her late years of adolescence to a Cambridge graduate is a refreshing read. 

Westover’s experience inside her father’s junkyard and mother’s herb botanical garden was its own classroom: tactile skills and resilience training for labor that would deter Tara from promising herself a future where she would live at her parent’s house scrapping metal and smelling herbs all day. This day-to-day work serves as an ultimatum for Tara as she reflects on if she wants to continue living out her parent’s lives. Tara does initially believe that she will carry on with her duties of marrying and becoming a mid-wife on her parent’s farm, but she soon realizes there is a way out just like her brother Tyler. Learning then starts to transcend from an unnecessary practice into voluntary solitude from her parents, outside in the junkyard. This begins Tara’s formal way to education when she starts to out grow the traditional Westover mold into her own self.

* It’s funny looking back at an interview conversation that Westover did where she mentions that she originally wanted to just write her educational journey and leave out the family part. I believe that it’s with her vulnerable writing of childhood abuse and mental illness that differentiates her novel and journey from others who simply mention their childhood as a brief snippet into their life. One’s personality and self-efficacy are formed during childhood and this period of life is anything but a superfluous stage to skip.

Murray’s story Homeless to Harvard is similar to Westover’s in many ways: home life is plagued with unsupportive parents until a new parental role is filled in college, there is a troubling bridge between the student’s past of rejecting traditional schooling and the student’s present of being absorbed by its power and excelling in it. Many of these plot points beg the question of whether Murray and Westover’s unorthodox free-range learning was a benefit to their later years in college. If Westover was put into traditional schooling with general studies, would she have formed the same love for education and an aspiration for a better life as she did listening to classical music with her brother?

Westover’s novel details education as not merely memorization and facts but how methods of memorization and learning facts can wrinkle the brain to absorb new information. An example would be the lack of STEM degrees in college graduates. Too many students believe that learning these difficult concepts in STEM, such as calculus and physics, is useless. While applying calculus in the real world is a rare occurrence, it is the act of learning calculus that stretches your mind to be able to learn more difficult concepts. With an ever-evolving brain for challenging concepts, these can open up the umbrella to other cognitive thinking in other aspects within the STEM field. 

*The beauty of this idea of education also applies to humanities majors, but with an influx of graduates with those majors and not enough jobs to support them, this argument heavily leans onto aspiring STEM students. 

However, traditional schooling with its required daily homework and long-drawn-out lectures kill any passion a student can have for learning. It seems to me that traditional schooling is not the problem but rather the age when children are being put into traditional schooling. With children, it seems that inspiration and passion can come from anything— it’s no wonder that so many young children cling to self-creation toys and games such as Legos, Minecraft, and Roblox. Tying children down to a core curriculum before they cans process the purpose that education has within their lives will only make school an inconvenience rather than an opportunity. 

A hypothetical question is: then would it be awful for a child to skip doing their reading homework to play with Legos, if that passion turned into motivation to study calculus and physics to become an engineer? 

I am not condemning the arts either. It seems that parents denounce a child’s passion too quickly if it doesn’t turn into something strictly formulaic such as math or science; theatre, art, dance, fashion, and cooking are often criticized when portrayed as a child’s life passion and is easily swayed to be categorized as a passion project. 

Instead of disciplining your kids into a strict core curriculum that will envelop their adolescence and later years until adulthood, why not allow them a chance to explore a passion that can open opportunities that eventually motivate them to ask the question, “What more can I do?”