How Beautiful We Were explores various forms of protest, or methods of affecting change. These methods can generally be grouped into education/pedagogy, property damage, violence, appealing to powers, working from within the system, and complicity. Multiple factors determine how an individual will decide to protest against oppression. For example, the ways different generations think about protest are informed by their life experiences: Village elders, who have been exposed to oppression for longer periods, are less prone to impulsive action than their progeny. The novel chronicles how these perspectives emerge through the voice of collective narrative voice of the children, whose opinions and practices change as they exit adolescence and enter adulthood.

The Restoration Movement and Thula embrace the education/pedagogy theory of change. One of the NGO’s primary tenets is that educating people will save places like Kosawa: “[I]f a child of ours could go to America and bring knowledge back to us, someday no government or corporation would be able to do to us the things they’ve been doing to us” (130). Thula’s education does teach her about political ideology, while her inferior status as a woman allows her to speak freely when she is working in Bezam.