The Humans Rights Watch (HRW) in a new report — “Dreams Turned into Nightmares: Attacks on Students, Teachers, and Schools in Pakistan” — presents a sorry picture of state of education in Pakistan, where 25 million children are estimated to be out of school. More worryingly, the report details accounts of militant violence that has affected hundreds of thousands of children, especially girls. While attacks on Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai (2012), and the Army Public School in Peshawar (2014) are well known, Pakistanis are not fully aware of how thousands of school-going children have suffered in recent years. Since 2007 hundreds of attacks have left school buildings destroyed, teachers and students have been targeted leading to a difficult environment for parents to send their children to school. More often than not, female students and their teachers have borne the brunt of such attacks. According to Global Terrorism Database, 867 attacks on educational institutions were carried out during the period 2007 to 2015, killing 392 people and injuring another 724. HRW rightly points to the lack of reliable, countrywide data given the scale of the problem. It is yet another sign of lack of interest by the elites when it comes to ordinary citizens’ fundamental right to education. Militant groups such as the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi have carried out these attacks in their bid to terrorise as well as promote their ideology that considers girls’ education un-Islamic. Lest we forget, one of the first acts of Taliban in Afghanistan in 1990’s was to prohibit girls from attending school. Their Pakistani counterparts repeated such acts in Swat from 2007 onwards. More than 900 girls schools were forcibly closed and resultantly 120,000 girls had the doors of education closed on them. These acts put 8,000 female teachers out of work. The HRW report also draws attention to the misuse of educational institutions by security forces, political groups, and criminal gangs. We need a clear policy to prevent schools turning into security outposts as this invokes reprisals. Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the school saga is the impunity with which such attacks recur. Most perpetrators have not been adequately prosecuted. An illuminating example is how eight out of the ten defendants in the attack on Malala Yousafzai were acquitted in 2015. The list is long and the inability to reform our criminal justice system is another sordid story all too well known. In the past, our authorities have responded to reports by international rights watchdogs in a knee-jerk fashion. HRW’s report makes for a mandatory reading for the executive officials and the parliament. Some of the recommendations are worth noting and we endorse them. First, the government must formulate ‘a comprehensive policy’ for protecting students, teachers, schools, and universities from such attacks. Local education authorities need to be a part of this strategy. Passing on responsibility for security to school administrations is unwise and ironically some teachers and principals are being prosecuted for inadequate security while the terrorists are roaming free. Second, an advance rapid response system is needed whereby schools are quickly rehabilitated after attacks. Reconstruction of a school cannot be an excuse of depriving kids of education. Bureaucrats and politicians are in the habit of citing resource constraints when it comes to social services such as education. What they conveniently overlook is that nothing can be a better indicator of state failure than keeping millions of children out of school and not prosecuting those who attack children and their learning spaces. *