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This paper intervenes in debates on education and social reproduction, developing the link between ‘parental choice’, class status and spatial mobility. Drawing on research in Canada and Hong Kong with migrant students and ‘returnee’ graduates, it demonstrates the relationship between ‘choice’, social class and international mobility, arguing that geographies of middle-class decisionmaking in education have been recently transformed with the growth of a multi-billion dollar international education market. The paper unpacks the meanings and consequences of international education in Hong Kong, revealing how migration to Canada has enabled middle-class families to accumulate a more valuable form of cultural capital in a ‘Western’ university degree. It argues for a geographically sensitive account of the relative value of international education and its close links with both class reproduction and place-based transnational social networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The `Willis thesis' has two component claims. The first is that class inequalities in educational outcomes occur in part through working-class misbehaviour in schools, and that underachievement is associated with male and female forms of gender traditionalism. The second claim is that this misbehaviour constitutes a working- class cultural resistance. In this paper the first component is operationalized and tested in a statistical model of student plans in Ontario, Canada. Results show that misbehaviour is a weak conduit for differential class outcomes, though expected gender patterns emerge. While noting that findings may reflect British/Canadian differences and that recent de-industrialization may mute traditional class-related student responses, I argue that Resistance theorists have over-extended their claims, and that gender, rather than class background, is a more durable source of cultural reproduction through school underachievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]