WHEN fuel prices rose sharply in March, the government closed schools for two weeks, moved universities online and placed public offices on a four-day week. The measures followed an external shock: Pakistan imports most of the petroleum it consumes and Gulf disruption pushed crude past $119 a barrel. Conservation was an economic necessity, not a preference.
The question is urgent again. As petrol prices touch fresh highs this month, reports suggest the federal government is weighing a four-day week covering schools, colleges and universities alongside offices. In Punjab, the education minister has had to respond publicly to reports of a three-day school week. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the department rejected a widely shared closure notification as fake. Parents and teachers are reading rumours because no published framework tells them what happens to learning when fuel runs short.
That absence is the real problem. A closed office postpones a meeting. A closed classroom interrupts a process that depends on sequence. A child who misses the lesson on fractions will struggle with every exercise built upon it. A young reader beginning to recognise sentences loses fluency quickly. Instructional time is not recovered by adding dates to a calendar. Consider what the March closure protected. Schools shut from 16 to 31 March, roughly ten instructional days. Examinations, however, went ahead as scheduled. The state preserved assessment and suspended teaching. The measurable event was defended; the cumulative process was not.
The disruption did not end at reopening. Teachers returned to compressed syllabuses and to classrooms in which children had experienced the closure very differently. Some pupils studied with educated parents, private tutors and reliable internet. Others had no textbooks at home, no device and no adult able to guide them. The same closure applied to everyone; its cost did not.
A prior question also goes unanswered. How much fuel does school attendance actually consume? The March package sought a sizeable reduction in national consumption, but no public breakdown showed how much closing schools contributed compared with grounding official vehicles, cutting fuel allowances and sending half the workforce home. Many government-school children walk to class. If closing every classroom saved little fuel, ten instructional days purchased a measure more visible than educationally effective. No public calculation has shown that the educational sacrifice was proportionate and the question has received little attention.
Pakistan faces disruptions no school calendar was designed to absorb. Floods displace communities, heatwaves force closures, smog shortens the school day in Punjab and insecurity interrupts attendance in vulnerable districts. Each emergency is treated as exceptional, although disruption has become routine. The usual response is to announce holidays or order institutions online. A notification is not a continuity strategy. The digital option illustrates why. Universities can move online with some credibility. At school level, a household may share one phone among several children, data may be unaffordable and teachers may have neither digital materials nor training in remote instruction. Announcing online classes does not mean learning has occurred. Nor is lost time harmless. ASER 2025 found that seven per cent of Class 3 children could read an Urdu or Sindhi story; in Class 5, 51 per cent could read a Class 2 text and 48 per cent could perform basic division. Every interruption widens the distance between the curriculum and the child’s actual ability; the child is then promoted administratively while falling behind academically.
The state must therefore distinguish between closing a building and suspending education. Buildings may sometimes have to close. Learning should not. Four measures would make that distinction operational and because education is a provincial subject, the obligation rests with provincial school education departments, not Islamabad alone. First, each province should adopt a continuity framework that activates automatically once schools lose more than a specified number of days. It should identify the competencies that must be protected, particularly foundational literacy and numeracy and issue teachers short recovery plans rather than orders to complete the syllabus. Completion is an administrative target; learning is an educational one.
Second, every school should maintain a low-technology learning channel. Printed packs, textbook exercises, SMS instructions and scheduled teacher phone calls are less glamorous than digital platforms but far more inclusive. The textbook boards already print and distribute to every district each year; emergency packs can travel the same route. Third, closures should not be uniform when the burden is local. Urban schools generating heavy transport demand need different arrangements from village schools whose pupils walk. Staggered timings, alternate attendance, pooled transport and protected classes for examination grades can conserve fuel without emptying every classroom. Policy should follow the journeys actually saved, not the visibility of the institution being closed.
Fourth, the educational cost of every emergency decision should be calculated and published: instructional days lost, how they will be recovered and which pupils are likely to be excluded. Without such accounting, the financial saving is visible while the learning loss stays conveniently invisible. Recovery should begin with a brief diagnostic exercise, not to grade children but to group them by need. None of this denies the constraint. A government facing an external supply shock must conserve fuel and protect its reserves and responsible criticism should acknowledge that. But education is itself an essential service whose losses never appear in an economic statement. The fuel saved this month can be measured in litres. The learning lost will surface slowly, dispersed across millions of report cards and future opportunities.
—The writer is Commoner from 44th Common Educationist — Founder of WHI Institute.based in Sargodha.
