Runchana Suksod-Barger offers a concise study of the history of access to formal education for Siamese (Thai) women from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In eight short chapters of a book that barely spills over one hundred pages, Ruchana gives readers an overview of traditional Buddhist education, Buddhist gender norms within Siamese culture, Protestant missionary efforts to educate Siamese students, and the modernisation of the education system as part of the Jakri reformation.
All education in Siam historically, argues the author, was religious: monks provided Siamese boys with a Buddhist education in temples, and Christian missionaries offered schooling in mostly Protestant establishments. Motivated by the belief that every individual should read the Bible in their own language, American Protestants translated it into Thai with the hope that this might attract converts. They aimed to teach Siamese boys and girls how to read so they could access the sacred book, but also taught geography, arithmetic, and for girls, various domestic skills. Runchana's historical overview covers well-trodden ground when it comes to Siamese traditions that afforded boys an education in Buddhist temples but did not teach girls. Females had a more complex and distant relationship to Buddhism and its moral code that associated women with the physical, mundane world.
Where Runchana's pithy book does make a contribution is her argument that the provision of an education to Siamese females by missionaries catalysed the Siamese government to offer opportunities for a formal education to women. Christian schools had a consistently higher rate of female enrolment compared to government and local, by which she seems to mean temple, schools. Missionaries also established schools in provincial areas where no opportunities for a formal education had previously existed for women. By contrast, the Siamese government sought to train civil servants in new skills relevant to Siam's modern administration, and focused these efforts exclusively on men and in Bangkok.
In the absence of consideration of other variables that may have motivated the Siamese government to offer an education to women, her argument that Protestant missionary educational activism motivated King Chulalongkorn to create schools for girls is seductive. It suggests that the government disregarded half of its population. Runchana supports this claim by referring to several appendices, tacked onto the end of the book, that display statistics on schools and students in Siam from 1885–1912, students by school level from 1913–1933, and enrolment rates for Siamese students in American Presbyterian schools from 1899–1917. Queen Saowapha, rather than the newly formed government education department, took the lead by creating schools that catered to elite women and offered a curriculum involving morality, class-appropriate etiquette, reading, writing, math and geography.
Only in 1921, with the Law of Compulsory education, were enrolment rates for males and females throughout the country boosted significantly, but only for primary school. Chulalongkorn University, established in 1914, did not admit women until 1927.
Religious influences in Thai female education would have benefited from a slightly more thorough fact-checking process. Several dates are incorrect, King Mongkut is credited for a quote famously associated with Rama III, and there is no reference to the education of Siamese women abroad. It also may have supported the author's argument to mention the impact of Siam's educational endeavours among Muslims in the south who rebelled against the 1921 Compulsory Education Act. French missionising efforts are minimised, likely because the book focuses on American missionary archives and sources, and there is very little reference to Thai language secondary analyses of the history of education.
