Educated

by Tara Westover

believe finally, that education must be conceived as a continuing reconstruction of experience; that the process and the goal of education are one and the same thing.

All my life those instincts had been instructing me in this single doctrine—that the odds are better if you rely only on yourself.

He’d said a lot more, of course, about how I was whoring after man’s knowledge instead of God’s, but still I decided to ask him about trigonometry. Here was a sliver of man’s knowledge I was certain he possessed. I scribbled the problem on a fresh sheet of paper. Dad didn’t look up as I approached, so gently, slowly, I slid the paper over the blueprints. “Dad, can you solve this?”

He looked at me harshly, then his eyes softened. He rotated the paper, gazed at it for a moment, and began to scrawl, numbers and circles and great, arcing lines that doubled back on themselves. His solution didn’t look like anything in my textbook. It didn’t look like anything I had ever seen. His mustache twitched; he mumbled. Then he stopped scribbling, looked up and gave the correct answer.

Dad could command this science, could decipher its language, decrypt its logic, could bend and twist and squeeze from it the truth. But as it passed through him, it turned to chaos.

Learning a different side of her fatherf. Talent and intelligence is found in a variety of ways

The gate opened a little, and I peeked through it.

That failure sat uneasily in my mind. It was the first indication of whether I would be okay, whether whatever I had in my head by way of education was enough. After the quiz, the answer seemed clear: it was not enough. On realizing this, I might have resented my upbringing but I didn’t.