Higher Education

Books about college and university, and what higher learning can do for a person. Tara Westover's Educated tells how a woman raised in a survivalist family in Idaho, without any schooling, taught herself enough to enter college and went on to Cambridge, and what that education cost her. bell hooks's Teaching to Transgress describes university teaching as a practice of freedom, where students and teachers learn together. Two powerful books about the meaning of education, for students, teachers and anyone who loves learning. See Education & Reference for more.

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Teaching to Transgress

Education as the Practice of Freedom

By bell hooks

In this collection of essays, bell hooks presents education as a potentially liberating practice rather than the one-way transmission of approved knowledge. Drawing on her experiences as a Black student, feminist theorist, and university teacher, she examines how race, gender, class, language, authority, and emotion shape classroom life. Her alternative, “engaged pedagogy,” asks teachers and students to participate actively in learning, connect ideas with lived experience, and recognize that education is never detached from power. hooks develops her position through encounters with critical pedagogy, Black intellectual traditions, feminism, multicultural education, and engaged Buddhism. She also confronts practical tensions: who gets to speak, how authority should operate, whether experience counts as knowledge, and how teachers can invite participation without denying conflict. The result is both an argument about educational freedom and a candid account of how difficult such freedom…

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Educated

A Memoir

By Tara Westover

Educated is Tara Westover’s memoir of growing up in an isolated survivalist family in rural Idaho and gradually building a life beyond the boundaries of her childhood. Without conventional schooling, she works in her father’s junkyard, absorbs a worldview shaped by religious certainty and distrust of public institutions, and initially lacks basic knowledge that her future classmates take for granted. Self-directed study eventually brings her to Brigham Young University and, later, to Cambridge and Harvard. Yet education does not function as a simple escape route. As Westover acquires language for history, power, violence, and personal autonomy, she must reconsider memories and loyalties that formed her identity. The memoir’s central conflict is therefore not ignorance versus knowledge alone, but belonging versus self-definition. It examines what happens when intellectual growth makes a former understanding of home impossible to sustain—and when telling one’s own story carries the risk…

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