Final answer:
Tara Westover feels an intense wave of emotion due to the clash between her acquired educational worldviews and her family's beliefs. Her childhood education focused on religious texts and survival skills, which left her with gaps in broader knowledge. The pursuit of higher education led to personal empowerment but also estrangement from her family.
Step-by-step explanation:
Tara Westover feels a wave of intense and unfamiliar emotion toward her mother because she is confronted with a conflict between the new knowledge and worldviews she has acquired through her education and the fundamentalist beliefs and practices of her family. Westover's education brought her to a science-based worldview, which was irreconcilable with her family's faith-based interpretations of events. Tara's feelings about her childhood education are complex.
She had received a form of homeschooling that focused heavily on religious texts and practical skills necessary for survival on their Idaho farm. While her early education prepared her for life within her family's setting, including working in the family's junkyard and using herbal remedies, it left her with significant gaps in knowledge of science, history, and current events. Westover felt a sense of loss being cut off from her family, yet her pursuit of higher education embodied a quest to fill those gaps and understand the world beyond the mountain.
Having been taught to distrust government and formal schooling as akin to brainwashing, a young Westover initially embraced her parents' beliefs. However, the influence of her brother Tyler, who left home for college, and her growing awareness of her own educational deficiencies, led her to pursue higher education, which her parents did not support.
This education eventually brought her into conflict with her family's perspectives, culminating in estrangement when she could not reject her academic literacies in favor of her family's survivalist ideologies. The pursuit of a higher education, and the empowerment that came with it, set the stage for Tara's personal rebellion against the constraints of her upbringing.
Therefore, Tara Westover's complex feelings towards her mother and her childhood education can be traced back to the transformation she experienced through gaining new literacies that stood in stark contrast to the world she knew. Her education was not just academic; it was a form of self-discovery and assertiveness, but also a source of division from her previous identity and family ties.