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
My parents would say to me, 'You can teach yourself anything better than someone else can teach it to you.' That was the whole ethos of my family.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Self-learning is more effective than being taught by others.
This quote emphasizes the belief in the power of self-education and the idea that individuals can discover and learn skills more efficiently on their own than they can through formal teaching. It highlights the value of initiative and personal responsibility in the learning process, which was a foundational principle in the speaker's family upbringing.
Themes
Self-EducationLearningInitiativePersonal ResponsibilityKnowledge
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about lifelong learning, one might reference this quote to underscore the importance of self-directed study.
More from Tara Westover
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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A mother is a school. Empower her; and you empower a great nation.
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