ABSTRACT
This book offers an extensive historical, theoretical, and empirical grounded analysis of higher education reforms in Thailand in relation to different forms of external forces in higher education policymaking. It is situated in the broader intellectual attempt to understand the complex relationship between globalization and education policymaking. Such study intends to investigate “the transnational flow . . . [of] educational reforms from one cultural context to another” (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012, p. 3), or what Hayhoe (1989, p. 5) called: “a serious treatment to the international flow of knowledge”. Rather than taking a normative view that countries make references to each other because they are “learning from best practices” (Steiner-Khamsi, 2004), this book intends to critically analyze how Western models of higher education have influenced the making of higher education in the case of Thailand throughout the past one hundred years. Saihoo (1973) persuasively argues that the development of Thai higher education has been a recent phenomenon of the past century, noting that “it is only within the past hundred years that we Thai have come to think of education in western terms” (p. 23).
