I taught myself algebra and a little grammar, and somehow I scraped a high enough score on the ACT to be admitted to Brigham Young University, even though I had no formal education.
Author : Tara Westover
I had been raised in the mountains of Idaho by a father who distrusted many of the institutions that people take for granted – public education, doctors and hospitals, and the government.
I had to be – I was in school for probably three or four years before I began taking courses in history and political science, and I just started to realize how big the world was. I mean, when I arrived in college, I didn’t know anything.
The things about my childhood that I really loved the most, writing about those things was hard because I knew they would never happen again.
Academic writing is such a different way of writing.
I knew how to write like an academic, so I knew how to write academic papers and essays and things. But the things that are great for an essay are unbearable in narrative writing.
I used to roof hay barns for my father. It’s dangerous work. Writing is much better.
If you don’t wake up and have your own thing, whether it’s writing or reading or traveling or acting or dancing or singing or being a mother or a father, something that drives you, then it’s all worth nothing. One of the key elements in happiness is purpose.
I think a lot of people have grown up with the idea that they can’t learn things themselves. They think they need an institution to provide them with knowledge and teach them how to do things. I couldn’t disagree more.
The decisions I made after that moment were not the ones she would have made. They were the choices of a changed person, a new self. You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education – Tara Westover