Tara Westover in conversation with David Runciman

[Music] but good evening everybody and welcome to this event I'm Barry operate on you across to the other gates Cambridge Trust and it's my pleasure to celebrate with you the launch of Tara's memoir educated Tara west over and to introduce the conversation that she's going to have with David Ronson here before I do that I would like to thank the publishers Hutchinson for hosting the event and of course for publishing and nazma Finley is here the publicity director from Hutchinson and with Farah they've been having an incredibly busy time hopeful from London today for an interview with CNN amongst many others I also want to thank people from the extinguish trust mandy garner who couldn't be here so effective Jim Smith and Selina fellows who've put a lot of energy into bringing this event to fruition and I will be brief in my introduction that it's really just to explain why this it's me that's welcoming you on behalf of the publishers and that's because Tara came to Cambridge as a against scholar to undertake research for her PhD under the supervision of Professor David Runciman here so we became a very late part of her story but I don't think anyone at the gates Cambridge Trust knew they were a part of this story at the time and a little bit about the trust which was established in the year 2000 through an exceptional gift from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation at two hundred and ten million dollars but seen down in purple a scholarship fully funded scholarship that brings international graduate students to Cambridge about 90 year and those graduate students and there are many here this evening must qualify for a scholarship being internet intellectually outstanding be committed to improving the lives of others and have a capacity floor for leadership and it will become clear during an evening why tarah became a gate scholar when you read her astonishing memoir you'll come to understand actually that it's truly remarkable not so much that she came to Cambridge but that she attended any university of all and it's not my place to tell you anything of a story you must read a book for that other than that she taught herself to the level required to gain a place at Brigham Young University in the States and sat in her first classroom at age 17 through her success there she was able to win from among some five thousand applicants against scholarship and arrived in Cambridge in 2008 initially for an MPhil and then for her PhD I'm sure you learn much in the conversation that follows and from a walk which when I read it over Christmas I found to be utterly compelling and which causes me to ruminate still Terra will I hope forgive me for quoting the last sentence in education which describes so elegantly discovery and it says you could call this self with many things transformation metamorphosis falsity betrayal I call it an education and it's my pleasure to introduce time and David now for their conversation Thank You Barry it's not often we get to launch a book in Cambridge that's already been number one on us Amazon or to interview me to interview someone who's come straight not just from being interviewed on CNN but by Christian Tara told me beforehand that there was almost nothing that I was going to be able to ask her tonight that she hasn't been asked over the past couple of weeks but we're going to open it up to the audience and one of you I'm sure will be able to come up with a question that Tara hasn't been asked but I might not be able to we'll see so I will talk for maybe 20 minutes or see how we go and then we want to leave plenty of time for people to ask Tara questions some of you will have read the book I'm sure many of you will have read about the burkas had the most incredible reviews there'll also be a chance to buy it afterwards and have a drink of us as well it's a story that almost we have to start somewhere at the beginning I think one of the remarkable things about the book is that you describe your childhood as a world which was seen from the outside very narrow enclosed but it was all you knew and as you were growing up many things that would subsequently come to seem strange seem completely familiar and normal but at the same time you knew something was missing and we know you knew something was missing because you sought to educate yourself can you give us a sense of what it was that you thought was missing while you were growing up in a world that was but you was everything yeah I think when I was a kid the mountain seemed pretty self-contained and self-sufficient in a way I I don't remember being aware of wanting something else that I didn't have it seemed like it was enough it seemed like it was plenty I think probably the first time I wondered if there would be a good reason to leave I think might be the first time my brother Tyler played music for me not I mean we had church music we had we had him so he's saying when he went to church but he played the Mormon Tabernacle Choir which is a really good choir and then he had some opera that he played and I think there was a sense when I first heard that this was something that would take discipline that you would have to go somewhere there were people who knew about this and you would have to go find them and then they could teach it to you I think probably music was the first time I thought maybe there would be a compelling reason to leave it was it was community as you say in the book where junior school but other kids did go to school and your family were different an aspect even within this small community did you have a memory of what you felt you might be missing from not go to school did that seem normal to you it seemed I knew it wasn't normal because that I knew that other kids didn't go but my perspective on it was that we were right and they were my father's view of the world public schools of doctors and hospitals of the government my view of all of those things was very much my father's view I had no experience of them for myself so as far as I knew his view of the world was the way the world was you said did seek out books I wanted to take the a CT and you know there was something on it called algebra that I had never seen before and so I had to learn that so that I could pass the test but prior to that I don't remember really having a lot of interest in mathematics except the one time that I had attempted to befriend one of the girls in my town who did go to school and I think I was 11 or 12 and she discovered that I had no idea what a fraction was because I didn't and that's gonna be into that but and ever so I think I had a morbid curiosity mask so I was aware that people would make fun of me for not knowing it but it didn't inspire me to actually learn any and so I had to do it for very practical purpose did you feel it it's a difficult question really awesome they're two bits to it so at the time did you feel any of this was unfair so they were kids who would learn this stuff anyway because it was just part of what it was to grow up and you always had to overcome a hurdle of them to to get that did you have a feeling that your life somehow I didn't again I think I and my perspective on it was that we were right I thought it was unfair to them I thought they were being they were going to this terrible school they're being brainwashed and they didn't know that they were they were being brainwashed whereas we knew I think when I got to be what you there was a person University I attended I think there was a long period where I was really struggling academically because I had never taken a test before I've never done homework or never and I say before there's a lot of things I didn't know the story I tell a lot as I raised my hand and asked what the Holocaust was since I'd never heard of it I was aware that I was behind and I was aware that I was struggling but it wasn't something that I couldn't quite license myself to think because I still fundamentally thought maybe my dad's view of the world was right so I would write these very confused journal entries where I would say things like well I know that it was the right thing for me to never go to school but I just wish I could have had some kind of education before I came here so obviously those two thing it doesn't really make sense so to us have been about you your father's view of the world it was a it was a very complete writing community all the different bits that needed to add up and it covered most things that you might know there was a there was a view you would be expected to have as you described at length in the book about hospitals needs not just schools hospitals it's the government it's the other people in the town what was the what was the single thing that kind of joined it all together I think for him he had a belief that there was some kind of group out there some nefarious organization sometimes we called it the Illuminati the new order had infiltrated all of these institutions and made them in some way correct and so sometimes he thought that people were willing agents of the Illuminati and more often he thought people were unwilling agents of the Illuminati and so his belief about medicine for example also had a spiritual component because he believes that theists at what he called the medical establishment was actively trying to hurt you but he also I think believed that in some ways relying on pharmaceuticals was a was injurious to your spiritual capacity so if you took an antibiotic he really thought you wouldn't be able to be healed by herbalism which he did believe in because you would be spiritually compromised your mothers have really important part of the story - I think a lot of the reviews tended to focus on your father as the central figure but in a way there are two central figures in the story and your mother is the other part of it it was a bit more about how she saw the world relative to how your dad so I mean it's obviously very closely connected because it's not the same she's complicated because I've always felt like there are two versions of my mother I feel like there's the version when you're with her there's one version and then there's the version of her when she's with my dad and in my view she was never as radical as he was and was quite skeptical of a lot of his ideas been as time went on I think she became more and more persuaded of his view things so I never quite know where she tracks on any issue I think she would certainly on her own make a decision to take someone to a doctor long before my dad would if you're in a real emergency situation but she would make you know quite late I mean she wouldn't in most circumstances she would never take someone to the doctor burns car accidents whatever she would she would never do that but I think if you had a real life threatening situation she would be more likely than he would be but if you were there that was it that if she moved ever time towards something closer to your father's view it's because she experienced the world in a way that seemed to confirm it I mean do you did you get the sense that she thought things that happened to you you as a family that things have happened in your lives show that he was right I don't think that but she probably would so I would have to say I think that's how she would say it but I think I think my mother committed herself at some point in her marriage to defending my father to the many people in her life who were saying he was a bit fringe for saying he was possibly crazy who were saying these things I think she committed herself really early on to doing that and when I was a child a lot of the time what that looked like was kind of softening what he would say so he would say something and deliver a big lecture about how wicked doctors are and all that and then my mother would come along and say Oh he meant this or you heard that slightly wrong I'm gonna just kind of clean it up a little bit and I think over time I think that that can erode her own experience as well I think she kind of comes to believe it sometimes and ends up saying things that she herself doesn't believe but they're better than what my dad said and she's repeating them a number of times and I do think there's a sense in which you can you can persuade yourself those things if you say them enough times and I think I think my mother definitely did that in the way that she would go go around after my father had said something you know I mean he would say things to my my sisters like my brothers wives my sister-in-law's Bob about how they were I think one of the things they told me he said is that they they had one of them had a baby in a hospital they decided to do that and my dad had said to her that you know all of the ancestors always attend the diverse you know spiritually of the babies in our family but they wouldn't accept that one because it was in a hospital and then I think he said that they wouldn't attend any of the other side of it because she made this decision and so my mother will hear something like that and will come along and kind of try to make it better than you know better there was I think at some point she can enter into kind of sympathy with with the idea behind the thing that she's actually trying to pretend it didn't happen does that even make sense that kind of circular logic you have this very like um I should read it I'm not gonna paraphrase it's beautifully expressed a note at the beginning saying this is not a book about Mormonism and as you say I'm gonna get slightly wrong but there are some believers and there are some non-believers and there are some people who are kind some people are not kind and you don't accept a correlation between the two so in that sense it's not a book about religion but it also is about religion so when with that big caveat that it's not but about and certainly not against Mormonism whereas religion where do you think now religion fits into your story your childhood well I had that note in for a couple reasons I think for one thing my family is not they're not standing for Mormons because they're not at all representative of mainstream Mormonism maybe most Mormons believe in education they believe in doctors and hospitals they're not super paranoid about the government so I know first just off the bat I think the temptation to say well this is a Mormon family it just doesn't work we went to a Mormon Church but we were not representative and so that had to be done for that reason the other reason is you know my father did use a kind of language of religion to enforce his ideas like with my sisters and Lauer he would use the spiritual kind of explanation for why his view was right but it's been my opinion for quite some time that my dad has some kind of mental disorder that when I learned about when I went to university and I learned about categories of mental illness like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia that was amazing for me because I had never understood that you could have you know for me the world was Sun sane and insane I didn't really understand it you could have another category and that was a way for me of making sense of my family because a lot of things that happened to me when I was a child and my father scrapyard or we were injured but I knew my father cared about my safety and yet we were never safe and that when you internalized as a child and you don't have the ability to grasp all of the facts I don't know I think you can internalize it in a way that makes you feel guilty or you're asked to do something that is really not safe and then you were hurt and you feel like you did something wrong or at least that's how I experienced it and I think having that extra bit of information but you know mine I just don't think my dad because of the way his brain worked was able to run the junkyard in a way that was remotely safe he didn't have the ability to understand risk he didn't have the ability to understand that I think that we could get hurt and then after the fact he would interpret that as a something that God and maybe wanted to happen as a path to spiritual and again it's not even care about our safety it was something about the way it's my work so my my view of it is that I think that the mental irregularity that he had caused the religious extremism I don't think it was the other way around and so I really wanted to be clear about that I would I really didn't want is for people to take this story and make it into a caricature of what they already want to believe about religion in general and to me it's not a story about that and in as much as it is about religion I hoped it would be about people in a complex sense and in a complex setting and not in a way that just reduces them to the same caricatures that we think about anyway so what it is mostly it's a book about education education yourself and joined the college system and then eventually found you at Cambridge you when you went to Brigham Young you thought you wanted to study music and you were drawn to a much wider curriculum and then through that you were drawn to history the history kind of becomes the dominant thing that you want to study do you jewelry can reconstruct that what was it so from music to the broader education that can makes a lot of sense but then within that I don't think it doesn't make sense to pick history what drew you drew you to history I think I was one of these students that every semester I had a different class and every semester I had a different major you know maybe the semester that I took psychology as far as I was concerned that was going to study sake because that was mind blowing for me you think wow okay I understand something now that is really key to kind of reconstructing my life and so there was there was a period where the right psychology is the thing I mean history was I said I got to be with you and I didn't know what the Holocaust was and I learned about the civil rights movement I didn't know about it before and I think history was the thing in learning about history I gained access to all of these different perspectives that I didn't have before and I think that was the thing that allowed me to have ideas that were different from my father's ideas so I didn't know about the Holocaust when I arrived and then after I learned about it I took a full course in Jewish history and then I think it was my senior year my dad was it may be where you the only time I went to dinner and he began this long lecture at dinner about the New World Order for some reason that particular day he was convinced that New Year the New World Order was actually run by Jewish people and that they he started talking about - and how they had and now he was actually talking about the Holocaust and I knew what it was he said that they organized the Holocaust for their own to consolidate power and they were gonna start winning and I recognized a lot of what he was saying I've heard it before I rub it in the protocols of the Elders of Zion and I knew the history of that text I knew that it had emerged the turn of century and I knew that it had been discredited and that that hadn't stopped it from being quoted by Hitler and my comp and I knew that my father would've been horrified to be quoting together so it was the time of my life where I knew what he was saying and he didn't know what he was saying and that was a weird reversal of our relationship parents often know words so their children say and the children don't but this was the first time I felt like you're telling me something and an older version of me would have taken all of this at face value and this version of me can't possibly because I know that I know more about it than you do and I think that that was that could be a bit of dick ting and there's always a sense that there was more to know and I think it made me aware of my own vulnerability I mean the past is when it sings all of us only know what we're told about it it's none of us experienced it there was something I realized I really only had access to one view and there was something really freeing in feeling like now I have access to a lot of different views and I can I can choose it what I think makes the most sense I'm not just vulnerable to being what it was I can try to make an intelligent decision about what I think it was and I think that would become really important to my whole life and my whole attempt to kind of break away from the ideology of madness my family it was really important to have that skill sustained you think Thanks and I think something else and then within the field of history you moved to intellectual history history of ideas history of the 19th century in particular so a PhD was on the role of the family in utopian political thought how did you get how did you end up there you don't see that somewhere closes the circle of yours make you see that would be one that I would have pitched it was ya know I think I was reading for some reason I was reading that one goes anyway and I was reading and I was really kind of amazed how much he sounded like Brigham Young and I had read a lot of Brigham Young when I was a kid that's pretty much what I had read my family wasn't illiterate we were very we read a lot but that's what we read and so I got all of these sermons by Brigham Young when I was growing out and I was really astonished to find that in angles so especially because I've grown up in this extremely on type a socialist with the gang and then here with here with these this kinship of ideas that really I'm gonna say alarmed me but really surprised me and it felt like something I needed to understand and then of course the 19th century ended up studying all of these experiments with the family structure and Mormons were they were doing that they were doing that with polygamy and I wanted to understand what was the intellectual justification of polygamy I had been I had been raised with the spiritual justification this mainstream Mormons they don't practice polygamy but they believe one day it might be restored so there's a theological justification I've grown up with that but I didn't know what were the practical justifications at the time and it turned out when when I started looking into it that there were a lot and they sounded a lot like oh they're kind of utopian this at a time so we're gonna take one I've got two more questions and then we'll open it up for the surprise questions you become so your story is unique in all sorts of ways do you think despite that that it's a distinctively American story I would have thought yes but other people said no so I mean I was thought yes and then and then there were publishers in other places there one wanted it and I wanted to translate it and so I guess I hoped that it wouldn't be such a narrow story that you would have to have lived my life to find something in it of youth but I worried that that would be the case so it's a great relief to me to find that people don't seem to feel that way and I think that their decisions I made about the way I wrote it that I I hoped would help make it universal I mean have you had a sentence just since its come out to leave you know about 10 days but you've been in the state six but it's had a lot of coverage you've been in the states you've been in the people in that in the United States respond in a different way do they find different things in it because it doesn't have a different political resonance I think it probably does I think Americans understand the Mormon context a little better but than like I said it's not exactly a Mormon context and I really like it when someone comes up to me and says and outlines some upbringing right it's just my hope and different from mine but so they're really identified with this part of it and to me that's that was always the goal I didn't want to write a book that you had to have been raised by extremists in mountains for this to make any sense I wanted the story which is why I think I tried to anchor it in these two universal polls one of them is education on the other is family and I think there are different ways you could write a book that would that would be an explanation of context so people asking a lot about how biology and whatever you think about the book it's written in a way that draws in a lot of studies a lot it's meant to explain a moment which is I think people were so drawn to it after Trump won the nomination and then the presidency because it is an explanation of this context and I don't feel that way about my book I would never say to someone will read my book if you want to understand Southern Idaho there are much better ways to go about understanding southern Idaho I think it could be a data point but it's not really meant to be a sociological study of those things it's I tried to write it so it's more I tried to write it as literature that was my aim I wanted to write it as a story with these ideas in it and not these facts yeah I would say Peters book if you want to lose down something about the human condition should we take some questions I also read it things me pretentious untrue we have a couple of mics I know obviously a lot of people I'm going to read the book but I'm sure there are bits of territory that you might want to hear about that we haven't discussed or if you have read the book or you'll get more pretentious questions we could talk about utopian sessions the mountain itself plays such a huge part in your book result it was a very as a factor as you're growing up is that do you feel that as a there's a continuity that landscape affects you very deeply always is simply the context of that particular mountain I think context does affect people deeply I mean there is a Hadley Freeman wrote a really nice profile about the book and she she picked up on something apparently she asked me why I liked I live really close to midsummer comment and she said oh why do you why do you like this and I told her it reminded me of I don't know if it does and she and she pointed out in the article that that's insane and I think she's right it objectively doesn't look anything like it but I will always think of it when I'm gonna feel that will just be I think important to me and I mean the mountain for me is this it's I think it's a really beautiful mountain and not just the actual amount itself but there were a lot of things about the mountain that I was raised with that were very beautiful the idea that my this kind of idea of us Indian princess so my dad told us about that you could look at the mountain in the spring and you would see the impression of a woman's body on the mountain face and he always said that the nomadic Indians had looked for this this woman the sign of her because the snows would mouth and then she would be visible and they would look for her as a sign that winter was over the mountain was thawing and it was time to return home so there are these really beautiful parts of my childhood that I really want to hold on to and then there were parts of it that were less beautiful or that were really difficult and I think one of the things I want to write at the book was to get both of those things back and to hold on to the things that were not good so that I you know this term gas lighting or the that you don't get they don't get rationalized or kind of explained away so that you can't respond properly to them but also that you hold on to the things that that you actually did love and that we're actually good how did you feel about the historic Cambridge Bay when you first saw it and that's the common experience people come to me from all over the world and see these amazing buildings and this amazing history it seemed like a real place it didn't look like a real place it didn't feel like a real place it felt like a really yeah I felt like I was maybe asleep or something but I wasn't that creative in my architectural imagination so now I can account for it at all it was whatever I was expecting it to be it was ten thousand times in a good way beautiful yep hi thank you so much for coming to give this talk I'm it's it's deeply intriguing so my question is you mentioned toward the end of your remarks that this book is a piece of literature you know sort of ideas in it but clearly there's a measure of I don't know they were to say policy implications to me or do you think that this state in any which way sort of failed in sort of allowing sort of the conditions that you described directed I haven't read the book indeed at all so I couldn't speak to specifically but from what you described who failed to intercede to ensure that you received a basic level of education or had some fundamental you know educational standards at all the members of your family knew I'm from New York and that's something that a state heavily involved in I don't know if in Idaho those have the same sort of regulations but do you see any measure of failure there or could there anything have been done at all I have really mixed feelings about it because I think it's incredibly hard to hold any one family I mean a lot of kids that do go to public school within a family will really struggle you know if there is a traumatic divorce and they're family kids grades will really suffer it's a really hard thing because you know I might go to Tyler home school is his children and they're really well educated they're really well adjusted they're really curious they're really healthy and yet a lot of times home school can be an excuse to not do any schooling the state of Idaho doesn't have any regulation whatsoever kind of a big statement in the law that says you should provide a comparable education but I'm not aware that there's any mechanism that checks on that I think that there probably should be some kind of follow-up it's hard to imagine not checking at all but at the same time I think I would be nervous about saying well every child and a home school needs to be performing at a certain level because I keep in a public school kids don't have to do that I guess public school means something different this country kids you public you know I mean I think it's really difficult it's a complicated area I would say but I do think Idaho it's 2 lakhs but I would also be uncomfortable setting a standard that would put more of an onus so that you can't have a bad year for example you know so if something happens and and a kid doesn't have an idea a year I don't I wouldn't say that means you know I don't know if that makes sense but I think it's hard to take think about a school exam you can give us the same test 300 children and you have a lot of plot points if you have a family of four that's kind of different and it's hard to locate them I think there's questions with the back of it yep I mean why do you think that there is so much disparity I mean you're really with said that in the time you were educated in there are kids who didn't even go to school this is just child challenges my perception of what America is why is it so much disparity and at least these are some basic things which even the developing countries are really gearing up to I mean I think inequality has been growing not just in the US but everywhere for a really long and I think sometimes the ideas that we have about ourselves can directly you know what what reality is and what we think is happening can be really different I think the US has a way of seeing itself that is classless and that's a really great idea I think you know I was I've been a Cambridge and I've been a Harvard and when I was a Harvard I did feel like people cared less who my parents were but then I also felt like the court the other part of that was they didn't have a language about to talk about class and there was a certain lack of awareness I think about it so I think that I think that the US has this great thing where it is built on the idea that it doesn't matter where you come from it matters where you go but then we know from economics from sociology that especially economics but inequality has been that idea has been eroded in reality it might not have been eroded in in the minds of people but it has been eroded in very practical ways nearly a quarter of people that because of that it's a problem and yet they say there's no way to talk about that yeah I think sometimes our ideas are we have an idea that education is for everybody and the education is it's something everyone should have equal access to and yet we tie funding even to public institutions to things like property taxes that end up it ends up being that if you live in a wealthy part of the maybe of of a city you live in a wealthy Street you look kind of wealthy part the city that your school will be great where as kids they go to a different school their school will not be great and these are public institution that makes no sense to me that you would say we're gonna have public institutions that some of them are gonna be great some are not that fundamentally the assumption under that idea is that is that not everyone should have access to the same quality of education and we accept that for some strange reason they can I just tristan that because there are two inequalities there's the inequality of your experience in your town to your you had a very different experience than the kids who went to school and then there's the inequality of an Ida higher education compared to say New York education or something when you look back on it now which is the one that looms larger this is like the one resident the bigger one because you have been back and you have thought about young people who went through the schooling system you might have gone through a little bit different so when you say millions larger which in which which which seems the bigger gap the gap between your experience and the other kids in your town or to have grown up in that part of the United States compared to kids you know most seem pretty big I mean my experience in a lot of ways I think there were things about my upbringing that I'm really grateful for and I don't I can't be counterfactuals I don't know what would have happened if I went to that school I have no idea how things would have turned out but I think you know my parents did raise us with an idea that anything you want to learn you can and you can certainly teach yourself something better than someone else can teach it to you and I I'm really grateful I have that idea because I think some of the kids who were my age you grew up in my town I think their whole idea of education was formed it's almost like their experience of it was of exams and homework or football is huge right from you know the Friday Night Lights show that's that's it exactly and I think that they probably were a bit misled about what an education is and one of the things that when I talk to them now I'm just not sure they really know there isn't it there is an inherent respect for education and they they know it's a good thing but it's hard for them to imagine what it might mean and what it might do because they don't know anyone in their town who had it or who they just don't have a broad sense of what an education might do and where they might be able to go with it and specifically where College I mean when I was asking science meet some of them I was gonna write a book about it and I might still but I would say I I am this one story I told you before which was they handed me this one woman who'd gone to item estate dropped out after two semesters she studied communications and I said to her one thing I asked her who she knew that had a college degree from our town and she said I think some of our teachers have them but that's it I was the only person she can think of that she never met who had a college education and then I asked her why she wanted to study communications or what she thought she might do with it and she said I don't know I guess I thought I would be a TV presenter I mean thing from her that was the only visible thing she thought what communication I mean this is the thing that you can do with communication she had you know other she'd never met anyone else who had done any of the hundreds of jobs you could do with that degree and so I think sometimes it can be a very narrow idea of Education that people have and I didn't have that and I in some ways I'm kind of grateful that I didn't whereas in other ways there were moments when I was at the University when I didn't have any idea what people were talking about and they were talking about something that everybody knew about like the Holocaust that I I thought I had really got the worst deal I can't have a better future and then we'll come to you okay so one of the things I found one of the things I find really interesting about your story is you went from a situation where you're really tightly constrained and that you had access to basically one perspective and you felt compelled that characterization is correct to get access to more and I feel like a lot of people almost go in the opposite direction right and that you have at least the opportunity to have access to a lot of perspectives and yet people feel compelled to get into a little bubble and reduce the number of perspectives you have access I know myself when I'm marking students paper I'll be like oh I really it's cuz it reinforces some of my preconceptions I have to check that and and so I don't know if you think I don't you say it's not a sociological sir but I don't know if you think your experience gave you any kind of special or particular insights into why people do tend to you know drift towards trying to find single perspective I mean I think it can be very comfortable right and and it reduces cognitive dissonance all these but I don't know if you think you're you're experiencing the exact opposite direction helps you understand that I do you think that our ideas about money I think but we think education is supposed to be comfortable and I think it's supposed to be safe and you're gonna be with people who mostly agree with you and then you're all gonna learn about I find that idea to be a bit toxic and I mean there was nothing safe or comfortable about my experience education at all incredibly uncomfortable and in a way I think just something like the thing that creeps me out about education now is I think that there's a feeling that we know what we're going to get out of it when we put someone into it and that is a really disturbing idea because I think you'd be hard-pressed to explain why that's not propaganda if that's the case if you know what someone's political religious other be like all their view is you know what you're going to get out of the other end that is a really disturbing thing it should not be like that I think it should I think it should be a lot more open-ended and I think I do worry about the fact that I think that education can be two things education is the idea of going out and getting access to different ideas and experiences and perspectives and when you read and you learn that's education and ideal thing but it can be and then there's what it is and what it is often is a group of like-minded similarly wealthy people getting together and deciding how the world is and how to see it and who's right and what version of history is right and what version of everything of politics is right and that is pretty far from the ideal to say well this is a human institution with all of the foibles that come with that and the identity politics and the power call and the power plays and controls of narrative becometh people running something versus the idea of Education being that truth the knowledge and perspectives and all of that I think that the more that we can try to open up this the second one and make it the other one the better you know the more that the more that we try to take there should be lots of different kinds of people in a classroom and it's troubling to think that people are being separated into classrooms now that certain kinds of people go to these kinds of schools and and that the people that are in especially at the university you can kind of understand it may be a you know primary school because that's geographically located and people are sorting themselves out geographically they're they're doing that themselves but it's odd that universities are so much like that that should be the place where you really encounter difference and that should be a place where you really get to experience different people and it's it's odd I think that that seems to not be happening and this actually kind of follows on from that question does that mean that you think there is some merit to your father's suspicions of the education system there have actually been some suggestions that even here the way the politics course is structured having students results first means that a certain type of graduate is produced that goes out into the world understanding the state and societies your very specific lens I don't because I don't think he had the right concerns that education kind of like with doctors and hospitals I think they're massive problems the pharmaceutical industry I think there's we have a really problematic relationship with drugs I think in any modern society but his particular fears are not right as near as I can tell I don't think people with spiritual standing for taking medicine I don't think that so just because the institutions aren't perfect I don't think he said he was correct about him first first home school and stuff goes I think the reason is why evil home school are really important if you're home schooling your child because you want to limit their access to other ways of thinking that's probably bad and if you're homeschooling one because you think you can provide them with more ways of thinking and access to ideas in the school that might be good and I think probably education I think that's my maybe generally if you're trying to control the access to ideas that people have us probably not not really an educator something else this is that defensive but it relates to terrorist last answer which is challenged in a ways to construct a course which is designed to provoke you with ideas they're not familiar with things that might be you might be challenging might be difficult without it seeming that you're trying to say we will each move from here to here you are thinking this and we now want you to think that what we want to do is to have these two things balanced of each other but it's really hard in the current context we're not to seem like your friend produce an outcome but we know I'm a lot more concerned about debates and universities people reading the same text and having the same interpretation alarms me a lot more than having the same text I think everyone reading the same starting with the same thinker is less alarming than there being one really dominant way of thinking about it and no other perspective is welcome that disturbs me a lot more from the middle go together thank you my question is also building upon the two questions that have been asked previously I'm wondering so when you were learning about the Holocaust and and when discussing Jewish history I'm at dinner with your father I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about the transition that you went through in I guess getting to a point where you regarded them the knowledge that you picked up through a college education as as something objective that had the upper hand over whatever it is that your father believed about the about Jewish history and I guess my question is and the same vein but from a different angle would you consider the books that you read at home before you went to any kind of school also kind of education right and in the same way would you consider the things that your father believes about Jewish history or whatever it is also his knowledge and if not where is exactly the what is the threshold that you have to cross in order for something to become an objective kind of knowledge from being just a mere belief big question I think it was a slow trip for me from I was I think I'm always gonna be a bit susceptible to my dad's there are always gonna be moments where I hear things and they will sound true to me because of the number of times I heard them and because of the age I was when I heard them and I am always going to have to stop and think about that and try to bring in other perspectives I've gained since then but it's you know it's not a completely clean it's not like every day I got slightly more I got slightly more independent there were a lot of moments where I would go back the other way and I would see things the way he did and then slowly things get chipped away I mean the Holocaust moment in that moment where he with where he was at dinner I think that was the first time I was really confident that I knew something that he didn't know but there were plenty of other times later when he would say something is this way and I didn't know about that and I would again just give way and I think I think probably holding out for a standard about so truth you know good luck with that but I think that you can feel like you've read enough and you know enough about this but you know what you think and I think that was something you know I I had read the protocols the older design but I'd also read a lot of other anti-semitic things and I'd read about how I read how they came about and I had read I had really read around that as well as read that specific thing and I could then take what my dad was saying and fit it into a context of other texts and that was a way for me of understanding it but I think it's the problem everyone has it's kind of a universal experience I think part of what it means to grow up it's learning to define yourself both in connection to and in contradiction to your parents to what degree you challenge the worldview that you're given for every person that's going to be different but I think there's something about getting access to the different perspectives and weighing them and maybe you'll come out the same way it started maybe you'll read everything and decide my parents were right about everything but it's important that you go through that process I think before you make that decision if you make that decision and don't go through the process I don't think you can really claim the opinions as yours they really belong to other people it was the question that okay that would be wonderful yeah thank you very much with all you've said I've been absolutely astounded by what I read about you on the Internet in the last couple of weeks it's been incredible and there's an awesome man living in Cambridge I've been asking a number of teachers in the last few weeks what they mean by the word education and actually most of them don't even know what it means because it means to draw out it's the opposite of putting in and I think what you've been saying very much reflects that I'd like your opinion about is drawing out of education well I think I mean I read John Dewey recently and I quote him at the front of my book and I like how he separates out what he says other components children the components of Education of the social and the individual or he calls it what society brings to an education that one individual brings and I think what society brings is an accumulation of knowledge you know so know that I'd be a no single person invented the iPhone it took everyone on this body of knowledge and everyone was standing on the shoulders of the person who came before of all that accumulated knowledge do you need that social accumulation it would be so regretable to have every person just chuck out what was known before and start fresh but you also need I think the individual element and I think people do need to have buy-in in their own education and they they do need to feel like they get to decide what they learn I am convinced that any curriculum you designed for yourself it's going to be better than one designed for you and I am really if you were to say education and have people they could only pick five words to define it my anxiety is but most people would say exam essay assignment worksheet and if that's what we think in education is that is real column because I mean what a depressing set of words to think of if you think of how that Fang here's the pursuit of truth the knowledge and perspectives and making your own mind and then really creating the world and creating your own ability to see it interpret it versus this other idea as an institution that is run by people and has all the problems of any of you an organization and I think those five words are bit depressing really because as a representation of what education is hello can you hear me I think in many ways your story considers a success and not reference to your actual book but your personal journey perhaps of independent thought if it's fair to say and also what you've demonstrated for answer all of the questions this evening is an acute awareness of external practice but that may affect its access to formal education and perceptions of people who do have that which you gained later on in life and my question is seems you have this great awareness having one really serious a different experience is what advice or guidance could you give to the individual so rather than focusing on the external factors social political that may limit a person's education world guidance would you give to a socially disadvantaged person young person from different cultures what would you encourage them to do to engage in this if they would like to access those opportunities that you've sought for yourself does that make sense yeah I think I think in some ways a lot of people have been convinced that they can't learn things I think the institutional idea of Education is so strong that if you want to learn something you need to get a degree you need to go through a course you need to have all these things and I think if I could try to convince people that you can learn things you are able to teach yourself things it can happen and probably you you might even be able to teach yourself something better than you would be taught if you just subjected yourself to an institution and I really like institutions I like teachers I like having access to smart people but I like to think of them more as consultants you should go to a teacher and say what's up there tell me what's out there so I can decide what to learn or what to read or what's what I wanted so I think I think I would I would try to convince someone to disregard the mythology but you need an institution to teach you things I think what writing and I'm writing I just learned how to write in there and try this whoops I've never written before and that's one of those things there's a whole mythology around what you have to do and be to learn how to write and it's mostly discouraging it's mostly okay you have to be you know you have to be a prince like not a cop you have to be porous dirt like Frank McCourt you have to have lived this life of utter trauma so that you have to have then you have to have been very well adjusted so that you aren't insane and you you know there's just some endless lists of things that you have to do and be and then you're meant to have read every book ever written before you're 15 and you meant to have been riding since you could hold a pen and I I just think it's all probably a bit overdone I don't know if you need anything in particular to learn anything I mean there are things that you do like eventually you're going to need an extra like a circus music but I think I think people are probably capable of a lot more than they think they are and I think because that institutional idea of Education is so strong I wonder if a lot of people have been persuaded oh I would like to learn to do this but I can't afford the course fees and I think that's really unfortunate you did I said I'd listen to a bunch of grammar lectures online and then I listened to you The New Yorker fiction podcast that was my curriculum it worked for me and what I really liked about it is you could pick the writers that you liked and I didn't have to study I enjoy a lot of different writers that are not helpful to me in the way that I write and I didn't have to waste months studying writing but I didn't want to use I could really focus on the writers that helped me and kind of disregard there's there's a certain dose of that and I actually have to be I love Joan Didion I actually quite careful how much Joan Didion I read because she uses a lot of relative clauses and I can't manage them the way she does I don't think she does and if I read too many too much of her I begin to write quite badly and says I need dose of her but never too much so I think yeah I I'm I'm a fan of the idea that people find out what you're drawn to and allow yourself to be drawn don't separate yourself from things because you think you need someone to take you through it maybe you do eventually but maybe you don't one of the amazing things about this book is it's a fantastic story but it does change the way you think about things and even listening to Tara since I answered that question change my mind about the way that we should construct a curriculum like no choice Bob's best choice I don't know but will you join me in thanking Tara for telling us about her mate [Applause] [Music]

Channel: GatesCambridge

Views: 175,942

Keywords: tara westover, educated, gates cambridge, david runciman

Id: nmcwrWkHbWk

Length: 58min 25sec (3505 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 14 2018