Canes Build Ministers: Discipline, Memory, and Political Socialization at Thailand’s Premier Boys’ School, 1934-1942

Crit Asian Stud. 2025 May 16:1-28. doi: 10.1080/14672715.2025.2502623. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

This article examines how Suankularb Wittayalai-a Bangkok secondary school long associated with elite formation in Thailand-shaped the political outlook of its influential 1934-1941 cohort. Educated amidst the country’s fraught transition from royal absolutism to military nationalism, these students were subject to a regime of intensified discipline and ideological messaging. Yet this transformation did not emerge in isolation. The article shows how earlier traditions-rituals of hierarchy, codes of loyalty, and an ethos of national service-were preserved and redirected to support a more militant and ideologically ambitious state. Drawing on alumni memoirs and archival sources, the article explores daily life at the school from 1934 to 1941 and traces how these formative experiences were later mobilized in divergent ways: to legitimize authoritarian rule, inspire revolutionary struggle, or anchor a politics of virtue. By following the long emotional afterlives of a single cohort, the article shows that elite schooling generates not a single political trajectory, but a repertoire of attachments and dispositions that remain active, contested, and politically generative long after students leave their classrooms.

PMID:40756647 | PMC:PMC12312773 | DOI:10.1080/14672715.2025.2502623