 <p>You probably have some relations between tables through these fields, as @Wrikken said in comments to your question. I've used a pretty similar table structure, and also added one more table to reproduce the assumption I'm talking about:</p> <blockquote> <p>-- First table, similar to problem table</p> <p>CREATE TABLE <code>bars</code> ( <code>id</code> int(11), <code>list</code> text, <code>bar</code> varchar(255), PRIMARY KEY (<code>id</code>) );</p> <p>INSERT INTO <code>bars</code> (<code>id</code>, <code>list</code>, <code>bar</code>) VALUES (1, '["1","2","3","4"]', 'TEST');</p> <p>-- Second table, to reproduce the assumtion</p> <p>CREATE TABLE <code>foos</code> ( <code>id</code> int(11), <code>foo</code> varchar(255), PRIMARY KEY (<code>id</code>) );</p> <p>INSERT INTO <code>foos</code> (<code>id</code>, <code>foo</code>) VALUES (1, 'foo1'), (2, 'foo2'), (3, 'foo3'), (4, 'foo4'), (5, 'foo5'), (6, 'foo6');</p> </blockquote> <p>From scratch everything works fine as expected, i can edit TEXT field as text:</p> <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/JOSTO.png" alt="enter image description here"></p> <p>To reproduce 'dropdown' effect I've opened a problem <code>bars</code> table (with TEXT field) relations:</p> <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/hhNz8.png" alt="enter image description here"></p> <p>and have added a reference to <code>foos</code>, a table with possible ids, that are stored in <code>list</code> TEXT field as array:</p> <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/5CIlL.png" alt="enter image description here"></p> <p>Now when editing a record i have a dropdown instead of textarea for TEXT <code>list</code> field</p> <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/P5Geo.png" alt="enter image description here"></p> <p>So, try to check whether you have your TEXT field involved in any relations</p> <p><em>sorry, no rep to comment yet, so giving a complete answer that may not be a solution at all</em></p>