For a long time, Pakistan’s education debate has been dominated by numbers: how many children are in school, how many remain outside it, how many schools have been built and how much enrolment has increased. There are good reasons for this emphasis. Millions of Pakistani children are still denied their constitutional right to education, and bringing them into school must remain a national priority. But an equally important question receives far less attention: what happens to children after they enter school?

This is not a new concern. In my earlier writings on education, I have repeatedly argued that access to a school and access to education are not the same thing. A child may be enrolled, attend classes for several years and move from one grade to the next, yet leave school without the ability to read with understanding, express an idea clearly, work confidently with numbers or think independently. This gap between schooling and learning lies at the heart of Pakistan’s educational challenge.

The recently released Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) Pakistan 2025 brings the issue back into focus. Its findings on children’s reading and numeracy are disturbing. Many children who have spent several years in school struggle with tasks expected at much earlier grade levels. The percentages matter, but behind them lies a larger question: what do we mean when we say that a child is being educated?

Our educational planning has traditionally been more comfortable with things that can be counted: schools, classrooms, teachers, enrolled students and textbooks distributed. Such figures are necessary for planning, but they tell us surprisingly little about what children learn. Learning takes place in a less visible space. It happens in the interaction between teachers and students, in children’s encounters with books and ideas and in the questions they are encouraged to ask. It can be seen in the confidence with which a child begins to make sense of the world. None of this fits neatly into a statistical table.

We certainly need school buildings, textbooks and teachers. But their presence does not guarantee learning. Much depends on how a........

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