Educated author Tara Westover answers your questions

Tara Westover:

I think that answer to that, you know, my parents had this philosophy about learning, this kind of idea of education that was very much about individual responsibility.

And I think that, in some ways, they took it a bit far. But I am grateful for it. My dad would always say that you can teach yourself anything, better than someone else can teach it to you.

And I think you can take that as being disparaging of teachers, but I don't think you have to. I think that the bigger point is, you could have a Nobel laureate in literature trying to teach you how to write, but if you didn't want to learn, I don't think you would learn as much as if you wanted to learn and just had a novel that was good that you wanted to learn from.

So, I think — I think sometimes our ideas about education have become very institutionalized and maybe a bit passive. And we have started to forget that an education isn't the same thing as a school. And I really do believe that there's really nothing that can make up for the absence of individual buy-in, of really wanting to learn something.

And that's something I'm grateful to my parents for.

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