This work is a distinctive and influential contribution to understanding education—in all its complexity—in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Tajikistan. With a focus on implications for educational and social policy, fundamental questions and issues about access to and purposes of education are raised and discussed. Appropriately, these are framed within broader, sometimes contested and conflicting, political contexts. A major strength of the book is that most of the writers have themselves progressed through the systems being described, and their contributions are grounded in realities. This work takes knowledge of education practices in the region to a new level and provides a baseline of understandings from which policy makers, future researchers and others can build.