The junta has enforced a culture of silence, with dissenting voices heard only fleetingly, faintly, in marginal and secret spaces. The Mandalay art student managed to make a clandestine arrangement to study privately with two of his teachers. However, after his headmaster found out, he was denied the annual award for most talented student. The student said, the military hates educated people. They suppress all people who can create or invent, so that old people with talent can t hand over their knowledge to the next generation.
People have to hide their skills and their work.
Likewise, many college students discover their country s history not in the classroom but in the bathroom, where activists post pamphlets on anniversaries of past uprisings against the regime. Others learn in prison, commonly referred to as life university, where late at night, older political activists whisper their knowledge and experiences to younger cellmates. By day, ordinary citizens must wear compliant faces, even periodically attending rallies to shout slogans of support for military rule and to denounce Aung San Suu Kyi and the pro-democracy movement. But they must be careful to lock the front door and keep the volume low. Merely taping a BBC broadcast and giving it to a friend can result in a seven-year prison sentence.