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Aydan Wade

Mrs. McCready

Memoirs

07 December 2022

Educated synthesis paper

One critical theme from Tara Westover’s Educated that stuck with me is the idea that you

get out of your education what you put into it. We can be handed all the tools we need to learn

and succeed, but it is up to us to use those tools on our own if we truly want to learn. Ultimately,

it is up to us whether we want to take advantage of school, books, etc. or not. I feel that the idea

of you get what you give is an important theme because it is something that is often downplayed

or undervalued in our society; we often place such an emphasis on relying on others for our

education, when, in reality, we must rely on ourselves just as much, if not more, for our

education.

One thing that you can take from the book that correlates to this is the eagerness and

thought that Tara puts throughout her years in college to be successful even though her family

might not agree with it. “I carried the books to my room and read through the night. I loved the

fiery pages of Mary Wollstonecraft, but there was a single line written by John Stuart Mill that,

when I read it, moved the world: “It is a subject on which nothing final can be known.” The

subject Mill had in mind was the nature of women. Mill claimed that women have been coaxed,

cajoled, shoved and squashed into a series of feminine contortions for so many centuries, that it

is now quite impossible to define their natural abilities or aspirations” (Tara) This quote just

shows how much that she enjoys her education and how she strives to be good at it.
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The article that I chose is, Why Education helps. The reason I chose this is because what

you put into education also comes back to you later on. In the article it says, “Americans with

more education live longer, healthier lives than those with fewer years of schooling (see Issue

Brief #1). But why does education matter so much to health? The links are complex—and tied

closely to income and to the skills and opportunities that people have to lead healthy lives in

their communities” (Par 1) The reason this is important is because without the idea of what you

put into education is what you get out of it there is simply a higher degree that it will be positive

if you do education.

In conclusion, education is important in general. There are so many things you learn

about the past so that you can move on in the future. What you put into education is an important

concept because if you don’t put the work in there will be no results and that might halter your

education. Overall, what you get out of your education is what you put into it.

Works Cited
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Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir. New York, Random House, 2018.