This article explores how children and young people from agro-pastoral societies in southern Ethiopia imagine their future. Children and young people who have not been going to school, as well as students in rural and urban areas, imagine their future differently. Their visions of the future can be located on a continuum between a future life as agro-pastoralists on the one end, and life in town with a job as an employee on the other. Where a person’s vision is located on this continuum depends on the influences he or she has experienced from school and town life. My analysis shows how, through the influence of schooling, young people’s concept of time shifts from a cyclical one, concentrated on the reproduction of the social world, towards a linear one, focused on personal and “national” development.