When my mom recommended Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover, to me, and then let me take a look at her 14-day loan library copy while I was visiting my parents for a few days, it was a recipe for trouble. I read it whenever I had a free moment, staying up late each night I was there, reading until 1 a.m. the night before I was leaving so that I could finish it. A fascinating read, the book is the memoir of a young woman who was raised with her six siblings in a fundamentalist Mormon home in Idaho. The book is beautifully written. The descriptive language is fantastic, although sometimes it felt a little gratuitous. The story had a great flow and used smaller stories with lots of tension to tell the larger arc of the story of her life. I found myself feeling a teensy bit sensitive reading it because I am a homeschooling mom of seven raising kids who I hope will someday own the faith I’m teaching them about in addition to their academic work. And lo and behold, my fears were a teensy bit well grounded. Let me tell you why. I listen to a podcast called Dear Sugars, with Steve Almond and Cheryl Strayed. I tried read Strayed’s Wild several years ago, but it was so self-absorbed that it ended up being one of the few books I’ve quit without finishing what I started. I haven’t attempted to read any of her other books. While I’m not a fan of her written work so far, this podcast, which takes the form of a therapy session/advice column, is done really well and I have enjoyed listening to it. Listeners write eloquent, thoughtful letters to the hosts, which are then read on the air and responded to. Sometimes, they have guests on the show weigh in on a letter or two. The show occasionally has some language, and the content isn’t always appropriate for kids, so I have to listen on headphones, which means tuning out what’s going on in my life – something I don’t have the luxury of doing too often. So I will find myself binge listening to the podcast from time to time to catch up. I have to be careful, because while the content tends to be good, sometimes I find it just is too much or isn’t good for ME, and I have to either take a break, or skip an episode depending on the content description. I was catching up on episodes and just a day after I finished Educated, it was mentioned on the podcast when a 16-year-old with social anxiety wrote in, angry with the parents who’d homeschooled her. And there is where the problem lies. I read a book about a girl who was raised in a home where her parents protected her and gave her a (very) edited and biased view of the world by keeping her home from school. I’m a mom, choosing to keep my kids home so I can, in part, give them my biased view of the world and hopefully they will adopt some of it as their own. I know that I’m not the parents in that book, but it’s not a huge leap for other people to make. Heck, Cheryl Strayed made it. She got a letter from an angsty, homeschooled teenager (who, by the way, was dealing with stuff EVERY teenager struggles with), and Strayed was like, “Hey! Read this book about crazy fundamentalists who tried to ruin their kids and only succeeded half the time! In fact, the author of the book got out sort of unscathed!” She sure did get out, and as it turns out, having an extremely limited education with almost no academic coursework didn’t prevent Westover from studying and passing the ACT as a teen and getting into college. Looked at another way, our brighter kids can get away with doing other things besides their schoolwork for basically their entire childhood and then go on to succeed in college, in fact, go onto to graduate work at Harvard. That may say something about how we “normalish” people have our kids spend their time (less activities and more playing in the dirt, perhaps?) knowing that all those “enriching” activities aren’t really necessary, while having time to study independently and thinking creatively undoubtedly IS. Instead, it seems based on Strayed’s interpretation, that what the book may be more likely to do for those unfamiliar with homeschoolers, is give them more fuel for the fire that not only are we Weird and Religious, we are also doing damage to our kids. And dang it, if we are being honest here, since we’re all sinners, we are ALL damaging our kids in some way or another, no matter how we educate them. That’s where people of faith cling to the hope that grace will fill the gap between our inadequacies and our desires for our kids. Perhaps the lesson of this book is that even if you try really hard, you can’t REALLY ruin your kid, if they find a way to get free of you. After all, to some extent, we are all independent agents of our own lives. I enjoyed Educated – it had much to say about what is needed in order to achieve an adequate education, and even more than that, is an interesting tale about one of the many versions of the human experience.