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She added, “A Chinese writer once compared critics to a mushroom whose body grows over someone else’s stem, meaning they are unable to grow on their own.”While writers do their job to contribute new thoughts and creativity to society, critics are accused of living by preying on writers’ work. Ms Cha- maiporn insists that this mushroom is not poisonous but is healthy for soci- ety. Critics devote their critical ability to refining and sharpening a writer’s ideas.“If critics didn’t exist, writers could produce anything they wanted without someone to filter out or suggest good and bad points. Critics lift our society up.”In Thai society, freedom of expres- sion is a sensitive issue that people often prefer to sweep under the rug. Idioms such as “all talk and no action” are levelled at those who criticize. Likewise keeping silent to avoid con- flict has been normalized as preferable behaviour. Silence might seem the bestsolution for dealing with conflicts, but Thais may need to take the first step towards solving problems by accepting the fact that problems exist in society. Critical thinking is essential for that.“Once we learn to listen to opinions through literary criticism, we alsolearn to listen to criticism towards other aspects of society,” Ms Chamaiporn said. “Developing critics is the same as developing readers. If we can create more readers, critics will increase. Yet our society lacks readers and if we want to change it, we need to change the whole system. The education sys- tem should be the place to start. Soci- ety must give significance to criticism, but it’s hard to point out who should be responsible for this. If it concerns education, at least we know the one to talk to about it is the government. The government is the one able to launch policies in every school underlining the significance of reading. And if the whole system is aware of reading, then they will be aware of criticism as well.”To promote awareness of reading and criticism as a system might sound like a long process, but the three-day camp succeeded in passing this message along to the 30 participants.Punnapa Saengyaruk, a camp par- ticipant and second-year university student at the Faculty of Education, Chiang Mai University, said she sees criticism as a very positive process.“It helps organize ideas and trains us to think logically. Criticism is not always negative – we are able to give readers the positive aspects of a thing and even if we point out a writer’s flaws, it’s constructive and meant to motivate the writer to improve.”In terms of freedom of expression in society, Ms Punnapa added, “Criti- cism is necessary and I want people to see it as a reflection. People’s modes of expression now still mainly consist of radical emotions. The principles of literary criticism should be applied to criticism of people in society as well.”Elite+ 33