Liberal-Progressive Education Discourse: The Dynamics of Practice and Agency in Contemporary Thai Education

Abstract

Critical education research in Thailand has accumulated substantial knowledge about ideological reproduction mechanisms, yet a theoretical gap remains in explaining the dynamics of teacher and student agency and everyday negotiation. This article pursues two objectives: first, to critically examine liberal-progressive education discourse and structuralist critical education frameworks shaping Thai education reform, highlighting limitations of approaches that view schooling merely as ideological reproduction and educational culture as rigidly authoritarian; second, to reconstruct new possibilities for critical education in Thailand through alternative theoretical frameworks that recognize teacher and student agency. The discussion points are presented based on four Thai educational studies that explicitly apply practice-oriented concepts across diverse ethnic, class, and geographic contexts, analyzed alongside Freire’s banking education and Althusser’s ideological state apparatus before proposing alternative perspectives through the practice theory of Raymond Williams, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel de Certeau. Findings reveal three theoretical insights: teachers and students exercise agency in selectively receiving, adapting, and reinterpreting structural ideologies; power relations in educational spaces are multi-centered and negotiable rather than unidirectional; and reproduction and transformation occur simultaneously within the same process. These findings suggest that developing critical education in Thailand requires acknowledging the complexity of the structure–practice relationship, creating spaces for teachers and communities to interpret and develop curricula, and cultivating theoretical language aligned with contemporary Thai social contexts.