THIS summer, Punjab established 6,060 learning camps across 3,030 selected schools in twelve districts. The eight-week initiative, notified under the Taleem Programme, targeted foundational literacy and numeracy among children aged roughly five to nine, alongside an out-of-school-children objective. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ran its own camps through June for grades three to eight, with remedial learning named in the notification. Neither province can be accused of ignoring the vocabulary of remediation. The difficulty lies one level below the notification. Additional classes are not necessarily remedial classes. If the same curriculum reaches the same children by the same method, only in summer, the system has extended instruction rather than corrected learning. Remediation begins not with another lesson but with a diagnosis, and with the willingness to act on what it reveals.

Consider a Grade 3 room in one of these camps, put to the test ASER has used in Pakistani households for a decade. One child reads a short Urdu story and retells it. A second manages single words but cannot hold a sentence together. A third does not reliably distinguish letters, and cannot complete a two-digit subtraction. Their admission records place all three at the same level; their competencies do not. Where camps reach Grade 8, the spread is wider still, the deficits accumulated across six years of promotion.

The scale of that accumulation is not in dispute. The World Bank’s Learning Poverty Brief of........

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