I felt like we had stories about family loyalty; I didn't feel like we had stories about what to do when you felt that loyalty to your family was in conflict with loyalty to yourself.
Tara WestoverRead
We think about education as a stepping stone into a higher socio-economic class, into a better job. And it does do those things. But I don't think that's what it really is. I experienced it as getting access to different ideas and perspectives and using them to construct my own mind.
Interpretation
Education is not just a means to a better job but a way to broaden our understanding and perspective.
Tara Westover emphasizes that education should be seen beyond its practical benefits of securing better jobs or improving social status. Instead, she describes it as a transformative journey that provides access to diverse ideas and perspectives, which in turn helps individuals to develop their own thinking and understanding of the world.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about the true value of education at a graduation ceremony.
I felt like we had stories about family loyalty; I didn't feel like we had stories about what to do when you felt that loyalty to your family was in conflict with loyalty to yourself.
I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley, and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring.
We think love is noble, and in some ways, it is. But in some ways, it isn't. Love is just love. And sometimes people do terrible things because of it.
I was 17 the first time I set foot in a classroom, but 10 years later, I would graduate from Cambridge with a Ph.D. 'Educated' is the story of how I came by my education. It is also the story of how I lost my family.
I think that when memoir goes wrong, it goes wrong from too much memory, too much detail. It's about clearing all that away and just getting to the story.
Although my family attended the same church as everyone in our town, our religion was not the same. I could stand with my family or with the gentiles... but there was no foothold in between.
For me, I was always the only woman in my cohort, first as a mechanical engineering undergraduate student, then as a chemical engineering graduate student. There were very few women getting degrees in those fields at the time. My role models were men - great men role models.
At O'Reilly, the way we think about our business is that we're not a publisher; we're not a conference producer; we're a company that helps change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators.
Access to quality education has enabled me to reach far beyond the Bangladeshi village I grew up in.
Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not damage it.
There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us.
We Americans are the best informed people on earth as to the events of the last twenty-four hours; we are the not the best informed as the events of the last sixty centuries.
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