Silent No More: Strengthening the Marginalized Through Critical Education

Dominant values in a society stifle and often maim those who live on the margins. In a culture such as Thailand's, where the surface image is of paramount importance, failing to conform to a glamorized ideal is frequently held to be evidence of moral corruption. As a result, extraordinary numbers of young Thai women silently starve themselves or undergo ordeals of drugs or surgery in efforts to achieve the beauty that reflects the virtue of the "good woman". In this monograph, the author describes efforts over two years to encourage young female students at a rural Thai university to re-examine their assumptions about the feminine ideal. He describes how the adoption of a critical education methodology popularized by radical educators such as Paulo Freire and Ira Shor prompted the students to investigate, challenge and ultimately resist the destructive beauty values which they had always regarded as benign and inevitable.