Educational choices must be made with incomplete, or imperfect, information. Parents hope that the education system will adequately train their children to take up rewarding careers and, in many cases, effect some measure of upward social mobility. The competing choices facing parents in Pakistan are challenging for all parents, but perhaps particularly so for those in rural areas, where the opportunity to participate in formal education may not have been available for earlier generations. This chapter examines some of those options that parents must navigate and the very real difficulty of predicting which options might maximise future prospects for the material and social success of their children in the future.

Lyon, Stephen M., and Mirat Al Fatima Ahsan. 2022. ‘A Complex Educational Landscape: The Impossible Choices of Private, Public and Language Options in Pakistan’. In Education in Troubled Times: A Global Pluralist Response, edited by Yahia Baiza. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-8602-4.

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