JAVED is enrolled in Grade 6 in a government school in his village. Akhtar, Javed’s father, is wondering whether or not he should pull Javed out of school. Akhtar feels Javed is not learning much at school, and that if he is put to work at the nearby auto-repair workshop he will not only earn a little, but would also be learning a skill. Though there is no fee in the government school, there are still expenses for uniform, stationery, etc, that burden household resources, which could be used for food and other necessities.
If Javed stays in school, even if he is able to pass Matric eventually, he will still not have learnt a skill and would not have any decent job openings afterwards. Akhtar knows he does not have the resources to fund college studies for Javed. Though Akhtar is waiting for the school year to end before making the decision, his mind is, more or less, made up: Javed will be working at the workshop from the summer onwards.
Too many of our children are out of school although our constitutional promise to them is free and compulsory education for all. Too many children in schools in Pakistan receive poor quality education. We have plenty of evidence. So, returns on education, in terms of what the child, the household or the family might get, from approximately 10 years of low quality education are not high. In fact, Akhtar is right; they are not worth spending 10 years in school.
But, this should not mean we stop calling for more education, for more resources for education or for a higher quality of education in the public as well as the low-fee private sector. In fact, the current situation is one in which we need to spend more effort and resources on improving the educational outcomes for every child in the country.
For Javed to have any chance of economic and social mobility, the route will have to go through education — otherwise inter-generational inequality will just keep increasing in the country. If we are going to ensure equality through opportunity, it will have to come through providing better educational opportunities to children from poor households. Physical assets and access to capital are even harder to provide to the poor. If poverty traps, for individuals and families, are to be challenged, quality education has to play a large part in it.
We need to spend more effort and resources on improving educational outcomes.
A crucial point is often missed in perspectives that unless there are greater returns, we shouldn’t argue for better education. Indeed, some level of education is now needed even for basic survival. Using an ATM or cell phone, accessing state services, even being able to pay bills, everything needs literacy and numeracy. Citizenship in modern nation states also requires some level of literacy. Inflating the role of private returns on education as the only thing that matters misses evidence of significant public returns when the young are educated in any society. For girls, the returns are even higher than those for boys. Education has an impact on decisions related to the age of marriage, the number of children, spacing between children, and the health and education outcomes of children of an educated mother. Even if there were no private returns on education, these public returns are large enough to justify investments in education for all.
Of course, the problem is that the family of Javed and Akhtar won’t reap the benefits of public returns. For them, it is private returns that matter. It is society that benefits from public returns. But this is exactly why we need to make an argument for the public provision of education for all children, especially for those from households who cannot afford to pay for even the minimum quality of education.
The private returns narrative is that if poor families turn away from education because it is of poor quality, we should let them be. But the rich, meanwhile, buy good quality education. This is exactly the outcome we do not want. Low returns on poor quality education and public returns on education should spur advocacy for increased efforts to provide children from poor households access to better quality education. No poor household would refuse to send a child to a divisional public school, Aitchison or Beaconhouse if they were offered quality education for free.
A friend, who works as an orthopaedic surgeon at a public hospital, once called to ask for some help for a child who had been admitted to his ward. The child had broken his leg and now needed a plate and screws to be inserted in his leg to allow it to heal. Without putting in the plate the only way to save the child’s life would have been to amputate his leg. The father had spent all the money he had in getting the child to hospital from his village. When he was told that Rs30,000 (this was a few years ago) were needed for the plate, the poor man had no choice but to say that since he had no money he would rather they save the life of the child even if it meant amputating the leg. The father was not turning down the better option. If the poor reject poor quality education, they are not turning down education.
In Akhtar’s case, if he is pulling Javed out of school, he is not declining education itself but rejecting the poor quality of education this state and society offer his son. The two are not the same. Not pursuing education because of its poor quality should not mean that we stop advocating for the provision of better quality education and for more resources to ensure this. To the contrary, this rejection is exactly why we need to ensure access to quality education to children from poor families.
The writer is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives and an associate professor of economics at Lums.
Published in Dawn, April 10th, 2026
