Every year, Pakistan's federal and provincial governments pour billions of rupees into public education, distributing free textbooks, waiving examination fees, and funding stipends and cash transfers. These are not trivial incentives. And yet millions of the poorest families have quietly walked away anyway. Entire cohorts vanish between primary and higher education, never to return. The predictable response is to ask what is wrong with these families.
We are asking the wrong question!
The honest question is this: why would any family, watching the educated remain poor, the credentialed remain unemployed, and the privileged remain powerful regardless of merit, choose to believe in a system that has never chosen them? Some analysts point to rational calculation, parents weighing crumbling infrastructure, absent teachers, and the absence of any reliable path from school to a decent livelihood. That analysis is not wrong. It is simply incomplete.
The education scholar Tara Yosso reminds us that poor and marginalised families do not lack dreams. They carry what she calls aspirational capital, a fierce, persistent hope that education can still redeem the future, even when everything around them argues otherwise. These parents are not indifferent. They are paying attention. And what they see, generation after generation, is a system that was never designed to lift them. It was designed to reproduce the existing hierarchy. This is not a broken system. It is the system working exactly as it was built to work.
What the Data Say
The data confirms what many parents already know instinctively. A mixed-method study conducted by authors across four districts in Pakistan, examining how parents weigh institutional malpractice, rational choices, meritocracy, and gender in their schooling decisions, found one anchoring result: the more a parent has encountered malpractice, including corruption or unequal access, the more deliberately calculated their choices become.
When the system stops playing fair, parents stop deferring and start strategising. More troubling still, institutional malpractice quietly destroys social trust and faith in meritocracy altogether. Pure self-interest only partially explains behaviour. Parents' instincts and their social connections depend on gender and often operate separately. Additionally, how parents think about fairness in the system is not strongly linked to their rational decision-making.
Parents, in other words, are not simply cynics who have done the maths and walked away. They are people navigating a rigged system with whatever tools their social position allows. While they seem to strategise on the surface, many still believe that hard work should lead to success. Education policy needs to address the disconnect between what parents are doing and what they hope for.
Where schools are located, how resources are distributed, who is recognised or misrecognised, and what outcomes are treated as acceptable must all be recalibrated around the communities that historical exclusion has harmed most
No policy brief captures this as precisely as one parent did in an interview: “The day people see the benefits of education, they will rush towards it. But after getting an education, there is no merit in jobs or other matters. When merit is clearly evident, people will recognise the value of education and pursue it.” There is no ignorance in that statement. Education has repeatedly failed to keep its promises for poor, marginalised families, and this has become clear over generations of observation.
A System Performing as Designed
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent much of his career explaining why education systems reproduce the hierarchies they claim to dismantle. Schools, he argued, are not neutral institutions. They reward children already privileged in cultural, economic, and social capital: the right networks, the right fluency, the right understanding of unwritten rules. Those who lack these are not simply disadvantaged; they are made to feel that their disadvantage is natural, even deserved. Bourdieu called this symbolic violence: the quiet, invisible coercion that compels disengagement without ever announcing itself as coercion.
A large segment of Pakistani parents has absorbed this lesson across generations. Some respond by gaming the system, purchasing grades, exploiting connections, and engaging in malpractice that has become an open secret. Others withdraw entirely. Both responses are rational, and both signal the same fundamental rupture: a breach of the social contract in which the state has defaulted on its obligations so deeply, and for so long, that families no longer expect it to honour them. Pakistan does not have a broken education system. It has been architecturally designed to serve some children and not others, and it has performed that function with remarkable consistency across decades and governments.
What Must Actually Change
The first thing the state must abandon is the habit of blaming: failures are attributed to parents who do not value schooling, teachers who do not show up, and communities that do not cooperate. This framing is inaccurate and self-serving. It allows governments to diagnose the problem everywhere except in the mirror. Trust is an essential precondition for genuine parental investment in schooling.
It cannot be conjured through enrolment drives or enforcing biometric attendance systems. It is rebuilt through honesty: the state disclosing, school by school and district by district, what it has delivered and what it has not; real, functioning channels through which communities can hold officials accountable. Transparency is not a communication strategy. It is the first act of institutional repair.
The second shift is conceptual. Pakistan’s education policy has long organised itself around the language of efficiency and scale. Equity and social justice appear in mission statements but rarely in budget lines. Where schools are located, how resources are distributed, who is recognised or misrecognised, and what outcomes are treated as acceptable must all be recalibrated around the communities that historical exclusion has harmed most. Anything less leaves Bourdieu’s invisible rules intact, ensuring the system continues to serve the same families it has always served.
The third change is perhaps the most urgent. The metrics that currently drive education policy, such as enrolment figures, test scores, completion rates, and hardware counts, are not wrong, but they are dangerously incomplete. They do not capture what a mother in rural Sindh or the remotest corner of Skardu actually weighs when she decides whether school is worth it.
For a country with 26 million children out of school, a 15 per cent dropout rate, and stark youth unemployment, we need qualitative, community-grounded, and justice-oriented evidence. New curricula, private-sector engagement, and teacher training programmes are not without value. But they leave the foundation untouched. And the foundation is the problem.