Pakistan, Oct. 4 -- Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah has ordered a province-wide drive to bring out-of-school children back into classrooms after a nine-day pilot in Thatta enrolled 702 students in five newly upgraded secondary schools. Thatta offers a useful lesson for the rest of Pakistan. The country's missing children are often discussed as one overwhelming statistic when, administratively, every one of them lives in a particular household. Finding them requires the government to leave the secretariat and establish who has never enrolled, who dropped out, why they left and what would make returning possible.

The national scale remains staggering. UNICEF estimates that 25.1 million children between five and 16 are out of school. Pu...