Educated: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Educated, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

As construction on the barn intensifies, Dad and Shawn recruit Tara to help on their crew. Tara is put in charge of operating the crane—an idea that was Shawn’s, and which incensed Dad. The two of them, Tara notices, are arguing intensely almost every single day, often getting physical with one another. Each time they brawl, Tara is in awe—Shawn is the only person she’s ever seen stand up to their father and even make him change his mind.

Tara is spellbound and even excited by the ways in which she sees Shawn, more and more often, standing up to Dad—often in her defense.

One Saturday night, Tara is at Grandma-over-in-town ’s alone. She is studying, hoping to retake the ACT and improve her score even more. Shawn comes over to watch a movie, and during the study break, encourages Tara to keep studying and tells her how proud he is of her hard work. After the movie, the two of them decide to ride home on Shawn’s motorcycle and leave the truck Tara drove down in the driveway until tomorrow. As they’re getting on the bike, though, Tara remembers her math textbook—she goes back in to get it and tells Shawn that she’ll just take the truck and meet him at home.

Shawn and Tara are having more and more moments of brother-sister normalcy, and he even seems to be supportive of her dreams of leaving home in pursuit of an education.

As Tara drives down the dark country roads towards home, she comes around a curve and sees several cars pulled off to the side near a ditch. Seven or eight people are huddled together around something. In the middle of the road, Tara can see Shawn ’s hat. Realizing what has happened, she pulls over, gets out of the car, and pushes through the crowd—Shawn is facedown on the road in a pool of blood. Tara has one of the men in the crowd help her turn Shawn over, and sees blood pouring from “a hole the size of a golfball in his forehead.” Tara peers through the wound and sees straight through to Shawn’s brain.

Shawn, who is just barely recovering from the trauma of his first fall, gets into yet another violent accident—one which appears to be worse than the first one, at least in Tara’s eyes.

Tara uses her cell phone to call home and tell Dad what has happened. Dad urges Tara to bring Shawn straight home so that Mother can treat him. When Tara tells Dad that she can see Shawn’s brain through the wound, Dad doesn’t change his position—he insists that Mother can deal with it. Tara loads Shawn into the truck, but at the last minute, she heads for town instead of home. She knows that though everyone told her that Shawn’s first fall was “God’s will,” the second one couldn’t possibly be.

Despite Tara’s claims that Shawn is in serious trouble, Dad remains adamant that Mother is up to the task of healing him. Tara, though, is not so sure, and decides to take things into her own hands. In doing so, she’s directly rebelling against Dad—and, according to Dad’s doctrine, God himself.

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At the hospital, Tara calls home to tell her family where she is while the doctor administers a CAT scan and determines that though Shawn ’s wound looks nasty, the damage is minimal. He explains that with head injuries, things are actually often more dangerous when everything looks okay. The doctor stitches Shawn up, and by three in the morning, the Westovers are on their way back home. Tara can’t stop herself from feeling “ashamed” and like a “bad daughter” for going against her father’s wishes and bringing Shawn to the hospital.

Tara made the executive decision to take Shawn to the hospital, and is full of shame and self-loathing when she realizes that things weren’t as bad as they seemed. She wonders if she actually should have brought Shawn straight home to Mother—in bringing Shawn to the hospital, she feels she’s wasted everyone’s time and money and dealt yet another blow to her tenuous relationship with Dad. The doctor’s comment that brain damage is usually more severe when the person looks relatively normal from the outside points back to Shawn’s earlier incident of brain damage.

Three weeks later, the envelope with Tara ’s new ACT score arrives—it is six points higher than her last score, and at last good enough to get her into BYU. Tara, high on the news, resolves never to work for her father again, and drives into town to get a job at Stokes, the local grocery store. She is hired on the spot. A week later, with Tyler ’s help, she applies to BYU, but is immediately overtaken with conflicting feelings that change almost by the minute. Tara vacillates between pride and self-loathing, constantly afraid that God will “punish” her just for applying. Weeks later, when Tara’s acceptance letter arrives, Dad says only that the letter proves that the Westover home school “is as good as any public education.”

Even as Tara struggles with feelings of shame and guilt over not being a good enough daughter to her parents, she experiments with independent actions and the prioritization of her own feelings—a radical thing for someone like her to do. When Tara brings home stories of her success to her family, Dad—delusional, self-absorbed, and indignant—claims her successes as his own.

Tara ’s term starts on January 5th, and waiting for Christmas that year feels “like waiting to walk off the edge of a cliff.” Dad ’s mood is terrible and volatile, and Tara is certain that “something terrible” is going to happen to her or her family and prevent her from going to school. Tyler , who is engaged to be married and starting graduate school at Purdue, comes home for the holidays and brings a copy of Les Misérables with him. Tara tries reading it, but is unable to distinguish the fictional story of Jean Valjean from the very real backdrop of the French Revolution—she is uncertain of which parts of the story are true and which are false.

Tara is about to change her life forever—but in the weeks leading up to her departure for school, she is beginning to realize just how little she knows about the world beyond Buck’s Peak. There are enormous gaps in Tara’s learning, and this passage foreshadows the difficulty, shock, and uncertainty which will mark the early days of her formal education.

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