2020 Writing: What Does It Mean to Be "Educated"?
The prompt included here is optional. Students may write about any issue, theme, idea related to the book, Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover, and submit that writing to the committee to be published in our annual portfolio and considered for the writing award and $100 Friends of the Library Scholarship.
Click HERE to print a flyer to distribute to students.
Tara Westover on Education & Privilege:
Tara Westover writes in her book, Educated: A Memoir: “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. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.” Westover sees her education as a privilege to “construct [her own] mind,” to “self-create”despite a limiting set of childhood experiences.
Prompt: Please respond to the ideas Westover introduces here about "education" and what it means to be "educated."What does it mean to be “educated”? What kinds of personal sacrifices are entailed in becoming “educated”? What privileges are afforded to those who are “educated”? |
Submit your writing by the March 13th deadline, please upload it HERE.
PRIOR YEAR WRITING PORTFOLIOS & AWARDS
Click HERE to View Our 2019 College-Wide Writing Portfolio
and Read Our Stories about Addiction
2019 Writing Awardees
From left to right: Professor Catherine Hayter and Awardees Hannah Stone, Chira Watson, and Milli Zunich
Read the Saddleback stories on the One Book, One College Writing Collective website: https://onebookonecollege.wixsite.com/notalone