Transnational meritocracy?: Parent ideologies and private tutoring

This chapter is interested in the educational ideologies that accompany transnationally mobile families, the strategies these ideologies inform, and the dynamics these strategies can produce in local settings and systems. Drawing on a sub-set of three interviews with transnational parents drawn from a broader study on private tutoring, the analysis profiles three different dispositions towards the use of private tutoring as an educational strategy informed by different ideologies of meritocratic competition and childhood. We argue that transnational families’ use of private tutoring is evidence of parentocratic, rather than meritocratic logic. Private tutoring is one resource mobilised in transnational families’ educational strategies as they seek to negotiate disjunctures between their home and host countries, and to mitigate risks generated by mobility.