Yet pupils love the Islamia Model School, one of thousands of private schools popping up in Pakistan. Unlike their counterparts at public schools, Islamia's seven teachers show up regularly to work. Unlike religious schools, Islamia extends its curriculum well beyond Islam.

Plus, it has desks and chairs - no small thing to the many poor families who enroll their children.

Pakistan is seeing a surge in private schools, a trend some find hopeful in a country where the government education system is decrepit and the other alternative is religious schools, known as madrassas, which offer little education beyond memorizing the Quran and are seen as one source of Islamic militancy.

The United States, for one, says it plans to invest in private schools as part of a multibillion-dollar aid package designed to erode extremism in the nuclear-armed country battered by Taliban attacks.

"The quality of education in the public sector is deteriorating day by day," said T.M. Qureshi, a Ministry of Education official. "When there's a vacuum of quality, someone will fill it."

According to UNESCO figures, Pakistan spends 2.9 percent of its gross domestic product on education, slightly less than India's 3.2 percent and well below the 5.2 percent in the United States.

One reason education has historically been a low priority for Pakistani governments, experts say, is that the governing elite can afford to send their children to the best private schools or to academies abroad. Another, the experts say, is the feudal structures in the rural areas that give landowners an incentive to keep farmworkers uneducated and submissive.

Only around half of Pakistani adults can read; schools often lack basic amenities like water; teachers get away with absences; and the bureaucracy is cumbersome.

But since the mid-1990s, small, inexpensive private schools, once an urban phenomenon, have been sprouting in earnest in the poorer countryside, offering relatively affordable tuition, according to a 2008 World Bank report.

Between 2000 and 2005, their number grew from 32,000 to 47,000, the report said. More recent Pakistani government statistics put the figure at more than 58,000. Around one-third of Pakistan's 33 million students attend a range of private schools, far more than the 1.6 million in the 12,000 madrassa.

The private schools tend to outperform their government peers academically, though generally speaking, standards are low across the board, said Tahir Andrabi, an economics professor at Pomona College in California who has studied the trend.

Proponents of private schools echo the argument for charter schools in the United States: that they can make schools better and children more educated - and, in Pakistan's case, dent poverty and the appeal of extremism.

Still, analysts say they are no cure-all, cautioning that insurgent movements emerge for reasons well beyond a glut of youth with little secular education.

"It's better to have private schools than madrassa," said Pervez Hoodbhoy, an academic and outspoken critic of Pakistan's education policies. "On the other hand, a lot of these private schools teach a very high amount of religious content. It's not a full solution."