Somewhere in Pakistan right now, a child in Class 5 is sitting in a government school classroom unable to read a sentence from a Class 2 textbook. She is not unusual. She is the norm. Unfortunately, somewhere in Lahore and Larkana, Quetta and Karachi, a market town in Punjab and a village in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Somewhere is everywhere.

Pakistan is facing two overlapping education crises, and together they demand urgent attention. The first is about children who are not in school at all. Researchers and policymakers are currently locked in a heated dispute over just how many — recent estimates range from 5 million to 25 million, depending on the methodology. But here is what no one disputes: even the most optimistic figure represents millions of children with no school to attend. One child out of school is one too many.

The second crisis is quieter, and in some ways more alarming. It is about the children who do show up in government schools (and low-fee private schools alike), which together serve virtually all of Pakistan’s enrolled students, and still are not learning. The latest ASER survey covering over 183,000 children nationally found that only half of children in Class 5 can read a story in Urdu or the local language, and barely half can do two-digit division — skills that should have been mastered years earlier.

In Class 3, those numbers fall to 12 per cent for reading and 9 per cent for arithmetic. Enrolment numbers may have improved in recent years. Learning has not. A child who sits in class every day but cannot read, cannot add, cannot reason through a basic problem is being failed by a system that counts him or her as a success.

In the face of these numbers, it is fair to ask: Is there any reason for hope?

There is. And the evidence is........

© The Friday Times