Educated是一部自传,作者Tara Westover出生于爱达荷州山区一个虔诚的摩门教家庭,有七个兄弟姐妹。
因为家庭的阻挠,Tara之前没有上过学,但她凭借着强大的自学能力奇迹般地通过了ACT考试,并被美国杨百翰大学(Brigham Young University)录取。
她的家庭试图阻止她继续接受教育,但她选择了反抗,并远渡重洋前往剑桥大学读书,最终拿到了博士学位。于此同时,她与原生家庭也渐行渐远,走向了决裂。
这本书的书名Educated取得很好,因为它准确地概括了作者挣扎着进行自我教育并重获新生的过程。
比学业成就更难为可贵的是她自我剖析以及自我教育的能力。作者成长的家庭环境给她带来了巨大的影响,包括常识的缺乏,视野的限制以及对亲密关系的恐惧,但她在后来通过自我教育一步步挣扎着摆脱了这些影响,并最终和原生家庭分开。这无疑是她做过的最艰难的决定之一,但这是成长不得不走的一条路,正如书中所说:
“You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them,” she says now. “You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.
对于作者来说,她所做的一切,她所经历的痛苦挣扎最终是为了能追求更多真相,能有自己的独立思想,能构建自己的独立世界。这也是教育的本质:
Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create.
推荐感兴趣的同学阅读这本书,在新的一年里实现自我教育和成长。