I have been having versions of this conversation with other parents in Karachi for the better part of two years now and I figured it was time to actually write it down in one place. The search for the is one of those topics where everyone has a strong opinion, almost nobody fully agrees and the gap between what parents say publicly and what they say privately over chai is significant enough to matter. This post is the private version.
The first thing I want to address is the reputation trap. Karachi has several schools for girls that have been considered prestigious for so long that their reputation has essentially become self sustaining regardless of what is actually happening inside the classrooms right now. Parents choose these schools because their own parents chose them, because the name carries weight in social circles and because the discomfort of going against a well established consensus feels riskier than the discomfort of questioning it. I understand that logic completely and I fell into it myself initially. What eventually pulled me out of it was spending time talking to mothers whose daughters were currently enrolled in these institutions rather than those who had graduated from them ten or fifteen years ago. The picture that emerged was considerably more nuanced than the reputation suggested.