'Education is light; it takes you towards the path of light': Parental Perceptions about Education and Their Children's Schooling in Northern Pakistan.

This qualitative paper draws on the notions of capital, habitus and field to explore parental perceptions about education and their children's secondary schooling in Peshawar, Pakistan. The setting for the study is two contrasting but mutually reciprocating urban and rural contexts; using purposive sampling, the data were gathered from parents through interviews and focus group discussions. The paper demonstrates that culture informs and perpetuates parental perceptions about instilling norms and values in children through education. Moreover, it decodes and explicates the common and ordinary language of parents that underpins the metaphorical dimensions of seeing the world and education from a number of visual and physical characteristics and within which education's role as capital, potential and propensity for making a difference to one's life is deeply intertwined and culturally embedded. The gendered dimensions and perspectives have emerged as important predictors in which patriarchal norms and masculinity obscure, curtail and constrain girls and women's education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]