AMNA NAWAZ: It's
graduation season, and
the memoir "Educated"
is the may pick for the

"NewsHour" Book Club, in
collaboration with The New
York Times, Now Read This.

Its author, Tara Westover,
had no formal education
until she attended college.

The unlikely path that led her
there was entirely self-made.

Tonight, she shares her Humble
Opinion on how an education
has very little to do with

the schools you attend.

TARA WESTOVER, Author,
"Educated": During my first
semester of college, I raised my

hand in a class and asked
the professor to define
a word I didn't know.

The word was holocaust, and
I had to ask, because, until
that moment, I had never heard

of it.

I had been raised in the
mountains of Idaho by
a father who distrusted
many of the institutions

that people take for granted:
public education, doctors and
hospitals, and the government.

The result was, I was
never put in school to
taken to the doctor.

I didn't even have a birth
certificate until I was 9 years
old, which meant that, according

to the state of Idaho,
I just didn't exist.

My older brother bought
textbooks and was able
to teach himself enough
to go to college.

When I was 16, he returned and
told me to do the same thing.

I taught myself algebra and
a little grammar, and somehow
I scraped a high enough score

on the ACT to be
admitted to Brigham Young
University, even though I
had no formal education.

That is how I came to be in
that lecture hall, asking
aloud, what is a holocaust?

Because I had never been
allowed to go to school, the
only history I had learned was

the history my father taught me.

His perspective
was my perspective.

He said pharmaceuticals would
permanently damage my body,
so I had never taken so much

as a Tylenol.

He said the government
had been corrupted by the
illuminati, so I said that, too.

His ideas had become my ideas.

His fears had become
my fears also.

Once I discovered education,
I studied for 10 years.

I sought out as many
ideas and perspectives as
I could find, and I used
that body of knowledge

to try to construct my own mind.

This pursuit would take me
to some of the most respected
universities in the world,

to Cambridge, to Harvard.

But it would also take
me away from my family.

I would become a different
person, and that person
could no longer go home.

What I would come to understand
from this journey is that
an education is not the same

thing as a school.

A school is merely the
institution through which
an education is offered.

An education is something
you take for yourself.

It's a process of becoming.

That is the power of it, and
that is the danger of it.

For some, the word educated has
come to mean institutionalized,
but it doesn't have to

mean that.

An education is the
remaking of a person.

You can submit to that
remaking passively, or you
can take an active part.

To choose the second
is to remake yourself.

To choose the first is
to be made by others.

AMNA NAWAZ: To hear more from
Westover, you can join our
book club through our Facebook

group, Now Read This.

And right now, online, Westover
shares insight into how she
writes, what she reads and why

- - quote --
"Inspiration is a myth."

That's at PBS.org/NewsHour.