Enrolment is not learning

An estimated 26 million children in Pakistan are out of school, one of the highest numbers anywhere in the world. The World Bank estimates that nearly eight in ten Pakistani children cannot read and understand a simple story by the age of ten.

Many of those children are sitting in classrooms every day. That is the uncomfortable truth we have to face: enrolment is not the same as learning.

For decades, our answer to the education crisis has been to build more schools, recruit more teachers and expand physical infrastructure. Those investments matter, and we must keep making them. On their own, though, they cannot meet the scale and urgency of the challenge in front of us. Millions of children are already falling behind, and we cannot ask an entire generation to wait for the slow expansion of conventional schooling.

So the real question is not how we build more schools but rather how we deliver meaningful learning to children now. Technology can help us answer that question. A child does not need a conventional classroom to learn to read, write and count. With the right tools, content and support, children can learn even where schools, teachers and other resources are scarce.

The idea is straightforward. Affordable tablets, loaded with well-designed and adaptive learning programmes, let children learn at their own pace, with content that meets each child at their level. Because the learning is digital and portable, it can reach children the conventional system struggles to serve, including girls who cannot attend school and children in remote or underserved communities.

In practice, the approach works through three channels that reinforce one another: community-based digital learning centres, technology-supported learning inside existing classrooms, and learning at home. Each can be set up quickly and at a fraction of the cost and time a new school requires. Rather than waiting years for buildings to be constructed and staffed, we can begin delivering learning today and expand as resources allow.

Children in underserved communities have gained real literacy and numeracy in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost, long associated with primary education. These are not numbers on a dashboard. They are children discovering, often for the first time, that they can read a story, solve a problem and learn on their own.

The question is no longer whether technology-enabled learning can help solve the education crisis. It is how quickly we can take it to the millions of children still waiting. This does not mean abandoning schools, teachers or investment in education. The opposite is true. Teachers remain indispensable, and schools will always have an important place. But we should stop assuming that the only way to reach every child is to reproduce the conventional model at enormous scale.

Pakistan needs to think differently. We need to combine the strengths of teachers and schools with the reach, affordability and adaptability of technology. We need solutions that can be deployed quickly, measured honestly and scaled with care. Above all, we need to put learning outcomes, not buildings, enrolment numbers or inputs, at the centre of education policy.

Progress will not always begin with a new school building. Sometimes it begins with something far smaller: a tablet, a well-designed learning program, and a child at last given the chance to learn. With the commitment of government, philanthropy, communities and responsible private partners, that chance can reach millions more.

Pakistan does not have to build its way out of its learning crisis. It has to learn its way out of it.

The writer is the president of Teach the World Foundation.