SCALING-UP EDUCATIONAL REFORM IN THAILAND:

Southeast Asia has witnessed a decade of transformational change such that children entering primary school today “cannot even imagine the world in which their grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born ” (Drucker, 1995, p. 75). Yet, even with the massive political and economic changes observed in Southeast Asia, fundamental cultural norms have proven more resistant to global forces. As Ohmae (1995) has observed: “The contents of kitchens and closets may change, but the core mechanisms by which cultures maintain their identity and socialize their young remain untouched ” (p. 30). This frames the challenge of education-al reform in Asia and throughout the world where educational systems are struggling to keep pace with rapidly changing environmental demands (Fullan, 1993; Hallinger, 1998a, 1998b). Nowhere is this observation more salient than in Thailand. Thai-land’s schools were never designed to produce the highly motivated, inde-pendent thinkers and learners demanded by an information-based econom