By: Qurratulain Mughal
Email: twinklestar4ab@gmail.com
Published By: ANI News Agency
A four-year-old child sits at a desk, holding a pencil tightly in his or her small fingers while practising a letter repeatedly. The page is eventually completed, the teacher ticks it, and the finished work is proudly displayed at home. At the same time, another child is building a tower with blocks, discussing with a classmate why it keeps falling and experimenting with different ways to make it work.
Who is learning more?
In Pakistan, we often assume that the answer is the child holding the pencil. We have become so focused on the visible products of learning that we have overlooked one of the most powerful means of learning for young children: play.
Play is not a break from learning for young children. It is one of the most natural ways in which they learn. Through blocks, children experience concepts such as size, balance, shape and measurement. While playing a pretend shop, they practise language, counting, negotiation and decision-making. During group games, they learn to take turns, listen to others, follow rules and manage their impulses.
The American Academy of Pediatrics reaffirmed in a 2025 clinical report that developmentally appropriate play supports children's language, cognitive, social-emotional and self-regulation skills. Similarly, Harvard's Center on the Developing Child highlights how games and play can help children develop attention, working memory and self-control, skills that support learning both inside and outside the classroom.
This is particularly important for Pakistan. According to UNESCO estimates, the country's net pre-primary enrolment rate remains below 34 per cent, meaning that a large proportion of young children do not have access to formal pre-primary education.
The picture becomes even more concerning when we look at later learning outcomes. The World Bank's 2024 Learning Poverty Brief estimates that approximately 80 per cent of children in Pakistan at late-primary age are unable to read and understand an age-appropriate text, with children who are out of school included in the estimate.
Play-based learning alone cannot solve Pakistan's education crisis. However, positive early childhood experiences can help develop language, concentration, curiosity and confidence — all of which form important foundations for future learning.
Yet in many homes and classrooms, we continue to confuse an early start with a better start. Parents want their children to perform well, while schools are expected to demonstrate visible academic progress. It is easy to show a notebook filled with writing. It is much harder to demonstrate curiosity. A completed worksheet can be photographed, but a child learning to resolve a disagreement with a friend cannot be displayed in the same way.
As a result, young children may spend too much time copying, tracing and memorising and not enough time talking, exploring, constructing, imagining and asking questions.
This does not mean that books, numbers and writing should be removed from early education. The real question is how these skills are introduced.
A five-year-old can learn about numbers by counting bottle caps, develop vocabulary by listening to stories, explore concepts such as floating and sinking through simple experiments, and discover mathematical ideas by designing and building a bridge.
The issue, therefore, is not whether children should play or learn academics. Pakistan needs to bring the two together.
Schools can allocate time for both free play and guided play. Teachers can be trained to connect play-based activities with specific learning objectives. Local, inexpensive and readily available materials can be used instead of relying on costly educational toys.
Parents also need guidance on what meaningful learning through play looks like. UNICEF's global evidence has repeatedly highlighted the importance of play in young children's learning and development, including the potential of simple household materials and nature itself to become valuable learning resources.
Perhaps it is time to stop asking children, "When will you finish playing and start learning?"
For a young child, the two were never separate.
