The Brutal and Beautiful Art of Education

Tara Westover and her family lived off the grid on Buck’s Peak, a mountainside in Idaho so remote that life there was anchored in “circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant that nothing had changed at all.” Tara’s father, a Mormon fundamentalist whose family had been living on the Peak for a half-century, ruled it as his kingdom, where he prepared for Jesus Christ’s second coming.

He “lived in fear of time,” as Tara wrote in her memoir, Educated—but time still transpired in his world, even if it was ending.

Educated details Tara’s escape from that world, the creation of her own life at Brigham Young University and, later, her development as a young scholar at the University of Cambridge. Yet what defines the arc of her story is not simply education, but her conscious choice to embrace education as a means of deliverance from an unpleasant past. Our personal histories, however unpleasant, can rarely be forgotten, but Tara’s story demonstrates how a liberal education can equip students with the tools to interpret these histories. It’s a memoir that, perhaps unintentionally, captures just how liberating the humanities can be.

The Westover parents homeschooled all their children. On Buck’s Peak, education was “entirely self-directed,” as Westover remembers it. Education was merely an open pitch, inviting exploration—but only when the children weren’t at work preparing for the Days of Abomination.

Indeed, an ever-present possibility of apocalypse loomed in the family’s psyche. As such, summertime was not enjoyed as a time of play, but constituted “canning season” for Tara and her siblings. The family’s military-grade 50-caliber rifle was a similar investment for the future. Beyond the preparation of provisions, the family’s Mormon fundamentalism, as interpreted by Tara’s father, forbade the use of modern medicine, a false god “whore[d] after” by the “faithless.” Herbs were “God’s pharmacy,” and Tara’s parents considered their use as a “spiritual doctrine.”

Tara’s “worth felt conditional:” “What was of worth was not me, but the veneer of constraints and observances that obscured me.” Educated captures the echo of this realization in Tara’s formal education “of a young girl rewriting her history.” As such, Westover’s is a story that reveals how education, however broadly defined, is a means for a more critical engagement with one’s past.

After much intra-family fighting about college, Tara decided to enroll at Brigham Young University. Her transition to university life was harder than her original decision to leave home. She had to learn about the culture of campus life, both the academic and the social sides. After weeks struggling in class, she discovered that textbooks were the bread-and-butter of studying. She adjusted to communal living and the norms of hygiene, such as washing her hands with soap after using the bathroom.

Those difficulties forced Tara to answer the famous question posed by Mark Edmundson: “Who are you and what are you doing here?” Tara answered that question by studying intellectual history and, eventually, the University of Cambridge, where she earned her D.Phil. on a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. As Tara’s education advanced, however, the acerbic echoes of home faded. Her father became a “smaller” authority in her life as she realized that he was trapped in his own head. The “literal and mental” distance Tara had traveled at BYU and Cambridge was staggering. An insurmountable crevasse opened between Tara’s worldview and her father’s.

To read Educated is to read of that realization’s impact on the development of a mind, to immerse oneself in a text about “the conviction to live in your own mind, and not in someone else’s.” Readers may be tempted to interpret Westover’s Educated as the latest iteration in a trend of memoirs about rural poverty (such as J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy), but to classify Westover’s story as such would be to capture only part of her self-portrait.

Her intellectual transformation from an inquisitive but disadvantaged young girl into an ambitious scholar is Educated’s defining arc. Indeed, Westover’s formal education, and her choice of history as a major, signifies more than a career choice. It represents the determination with which Westover distanced herself from and developed beyond the stultifying seclusion on Buck’s Peak, and thus the cultural, spiritual, and intellectual isolation that defined her childhood.

Tara’s crucial insight, however, is this: A college education, no matter its location, cannot deliver us from the past. Education can only equip us with the tools to interpret and live with that past. In fact, for all her academic achievements, Tara writes that she remained “two people, a fractured mind.” Drawing on John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, here Tara conveys the true value of being educated, that is, the ability to critically engage with one’s history.

Tara conveys the true value of being educated, that is, the ability to critically engage with one’s history.
A liberal education, however, is not just essential for the self-reflection and formation captured in Westover’s story. It is a central component of responsible citizenship.

Just as education enables us to analyze and explain the encounters and interactions that constitute our personal histories, education also empowers us to become engaged citizens. Indeed, engagement with one’s community—regardless of whether that engagement is of a custodial, conservative nature or more critical in approach—is facilitated by an awareness of its history.

Contemporary debates about higher education often fail to convey that a college education is liberating, and not only because of the independence it offers young students. Disciplines such as art history, French literature, and philosophy can each equip their students with the emancipatory tools of self-reflection, thereby helping students situate their own histories and aspirations within the wider world. No wonder, then, that those disciplines can also be the training grounds for engaged citizens. Despite university cuts and enrollment figures to the contrary, a liberal education remains a reliable road for personal and political development.

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Education Secretary Threatens Union Power

Since nearly the moment she was announced as President Donald Trump’s selection for education secretary, Betsy DeVos has been under relentless fire from Democrats and their allies in the education establishment. The most ruthless attacks come from national teachers unions like the NEA (National Education Association) and the AFT (American Federation of Teachers) and their state affiliates.

The NEA launched the “Fire DeVos Pledge,” declaring her to be the least qualified secretary of education in history. The claims include: “Her education freedom scholarships are ‘degrading’ to public schools, ‘threaten students’ civil rights,‘ 'widen educational inequity,’ are a personal attack on teachers, and are ‘dangerous.’”

Nor are the attacks limited to rhetoric. Thanks to threats from the teachers unions and their thugs, American taxpayers now spend $6 million per year for a security detail to protect DeVos. And she personally covers their travel expenses.

What atrocities have occurred at the direction of Secretary DeVos that warrant such hostility?

She is an enormous advocate for educational freedom, supporting mechanisms like vouchers and ESAs (Educational Savings Accounts) that put power over children’s education back in the hands of parents instead of bureaucrats. This allows poor children in failing schools the same opportunity for a quality education that children of the affluent and politically connected receive.

The ugly truth is that America’s education system is mediocre at best, an anachronism of the industrial age, ill-equipped to develop the minds of our children in the information age. Our children are placed in educational assembly lines, in batches by age, taught the same things in the same way, regardless of the strengths and weaknesses of each child, and regardless of their interests.

Our children suffer as a result, and teacher-union bosses couldn’t care less.

Al Shanker, former president of the American Federation of Teachers, when asked about the impact four teacher walkouts in less than a year would have on the children, famously retorted that he would “start representing kids when they started paying union dues.” Nothing has changed.

DeVos seeks to expand educational freedom and drastically reduce the size, scope, and reach of Washington politicians and bureaucrats, as well as teachers unions, which have an incestuous, symbiotic relationship. Unions provide (almost exclusively Democrat) politicians an army of campaign workers and millions in member dues in the form of campaign contributions, and the politicians block measures that allow parents the ability to move their children out of failing schools.

The politicians and union leaders thrive, but the children suffer.

Yet as noted by Rebecca Friedrichs, founder of “For Kids & Country,” a 28-year public-school teacher, and the plaintiff in a 2016 Supreme Court case that dealt an enormous blow to unions, “Freedom for families means fewer educators paying union dues — a threat to union power.”

All over the country, when “right to work” laws are passed, union membership plummets. While government-sector union membership stands at 37%, private-sector union membership barely registers at just 6%.

Unable to compel workers, union participation falls precipitously. Fewer union members means less in union dues, which means less money to pay off the politicians who give power and taxpayer money to union leaders.

Choice is the death knell for unions, which is why union leaders have long engaged in threats, intimidation, and even violence to protect their power. Those that threaten their power are subjected to character assassination and harassment by union mobs and their willing accomplices.

The federal Department of Education was established in 1979, with a budget of $12 billion. That grew to $70 billion in FY2017, Barack Obama’s last year, for a department employing more than 4,000 bureaucrats who do nothing but micromanage the decision-making of countless thousands of schools around the country.

Yet after four decades and hundreds of billions of dollars, the academic achievement of American children is stagnant in math and reading, and worse in science. As Secretary DeVos correctly notes, government can’t fix public schools.

The American people would never tolerate federal bureaucrats and their union cronies dictating where we select our groceries, especially if the stores we were forced to shop at offered no selection, stale bread, moldy fruit, and rotting meat.

Yet that is exactly what government forces us to do with our children, our most cherished possessions: feed them the educational equivalent of stale bread and rotting meat.

President Trump and Secretary DeVos are fighting the unions to obtain quality education and choice for our children. Every American should join them in that fight.

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Study: Peers, as Much as Faculty, Responsible for Harassment of Conservatives at Colleges

Researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found that conservative students more often self-censor on campus than liberal students. The reason? Not to avoid negative backlash from professors as much as that from other students who don't share their point of view.

Timothy Ryan, an associate professor of political science, and Mark McNeilly, a professor of marketing, sent a survey to the entire undergraduate student body at UNC-Chapel Hill. They found that conservative students who self-censor outnumber liberals, 68% to 23%.

Ryan and McNeilly note that the students did not respond negatively to maltreatment by professors nearly as much as they reacted to backlash from peers.

As they report:

In contrast, students reported substantially more anxiety about how their own peers would respond to expressing sincere political views — and the divides between liberal and conservative students are larger. Seventy-five percent of conservative students said they were concerned that other students would have a lower opinion of them if they expressed their sincere political views in class. But only 26% of liberal students had this concern."

They then asked if more liberal or conservative students would carry out tactics to block events that presented alternate views. Guess what?

Nearly 20% of liberal respondents indicated it would be appropriate to prevent other students from hearing a campus speaker express the disliked view. But just 3% or less of moderate and conservative respondents indicated that doing so was appropriate.

This stands to reason, and reflects a trend at other universities. Protesters at Evergreen State College and Reed College made national headlines for harassing professors who, while undeniably liberal, failed to stay woke enough. Bret Weinstein, a former biology professor at Evergreen, faced violent protests by students after he declined to participate in an informal protest in which all white people left campus for a day. He eventually resigned after noting that the campus was "out of control." At Reed, the Humanities 110 lecture faced months of student protests for supposedly not including enough people of color in its historical review.

It used to be that conservative college students feared negative backlash from their more liberal professors in the form of bad grades and leftward-leaning curriculum. Anymore, students come to college already conditioned to censor their own less-woke worldviews. This indicates that the problem could go much deeper, as secular humanists and social Marxists — after their own collegiate conditioning — have taken over the curriculum in high schools, middle schools, and even elementary schools. There's a reason intersectionalism is ascendant as an ideology.

That doesn't mean college curricula escape blame. One of the most prominent examples of millennial progressivism, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations and Economics seeped in cultural Marxism. Counter to the many headlines touting her degree in economics, it really isn't an economics degree as much as it is a degree in Third-World nation studies. She's undeniably intelligent, having graduated cum laude, but not exactly the next Thomas Sowell.

AOC is but one example of students graduating from institutions of higher education with their heads filled with progressive mush. The new trend, however, means that they don't just get poorly served by college professors — all too often they enter the academy preconditioned to seek out affirmation of what their previous school experience taught them. Ryan and McNeilly write of the result:

In order to better understand the typical experience of a university student, we believe it’s important to go beyond singular dramatic confrontations. The deeper story about free expression on campus, as our study shows, is not just about the shouting that takes place during high-profile incidents on campus. It’s also about what students say — and feel compelled to keep to themselves — in lecture halls and classrooms throughout the school year.

Mark Bauerlein expounds on this point at Minding the Campus:

The bigger story here is that many young Americans have failed to learn the basics of pluralism and the First Amendment. They don’t understand that higher education requires a suspension of political passions. They are too certain of their beliefs and ready to trash people who disagree. It isn’t just conservative students who are in jeopardy. Higher education itself is in trouble when the individuals it is trusted to educate are set against the freedom and forbearance that are necessary to higher learning.
Institutions once founded on the Socratic method have turned their backs on debate altogether in too many cases. This bodes ill for those who resist tyranny.

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