Asia Closes Schools for Fuel While US Trains AI Teachers

Pakistan shut every school in its two largest provinces on March 10 to save diesel. Punjab and Balochistan — home to roughly half the country's 230 million people — ordered all public and private schools closed until March 31. The official notification cited "the evolving international situation arising from ongoing war and its potential spillover economic impact such as shortage of oil."

Five days later, on March 19, the US National Science Foundation announced $11 million for training teachers to teach AI. The programme expects to reach 500,000-600,000 students across seven states.

Two education stories. Same week. One made headlines. One didn't.

The invisible shutdown

Pakistan's school closure isn't a snow day. It's three weeks of blanket shutdown across a country where UNICEF already counts 9.7 million children not enrolled in Punjab alone. Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz's government told schools to "ensure continuity of academic activities through online platforms where feasible" — but in rural Punjab, where internet penetration hovers around 30%, "feasible" covers a sliver of the population.

Pakistan isn't alone. The Atlantic Council reported last week that across Asia, governments are rationing their way through the Hormuz energy crisis by cutting the things that burn fuel. Schools burn fuel. Buses burn fuel. So schools close.

Sri Lanka declared Wednesdays a holiday and moved to a four-day work week. The Philippines shortened its government work week to four days, with class suspensions rippling across Iloilo, Passi City, and other areas. Myanmar imposed mobility restrictions that make getting to school a logistical puzzle.

In Lebanon, it's worse. UNICEF Deputy Executive Director Ted Chaiban told Reuters that "a classroom of children every day since the beginning of the war" has been killed or injured. Over 1,800 children have been killed or wounded in the wider Middle East conflict since March 2.

The two-sigma split

Here's the number that makes this story ache.

In 1984, educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that students who received one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations better than students in traditional classrooms. That means the average tutored student outperformed 98% of classroom-taught peers.

For four decades, Bloom's finding has been education's cruelest tease: we know exactly how to fix learning, but we can't afford to. One tutor per student would require tens of millions of additional teachers.

AI is supposed to change that. A controlled trial published in Scientific Reports found AI tutoring outperformed in-class active learning with an effect size between 0.73 and 1.3 standard deviations. Not quite Bloom's two-sigma — but closer than anything we've managed at scale.

The NSF's $11 million bet follows this logic. The programme will train 2,500-3,000 K-12 teachers in AI education across Indiana, South Carolina, Minnesota, New Jersey, Iowa, Illinois, and at least three more states. "AI is arriving in classrooms faster than AI literacy," said Jake Baskin, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association. "That gap is growing."

Meanwhile, Coursera and Udemy are merging in an all-stock deal announced December 2025, with the shareholder vote set for April 9. The combined company would become the largest online learning platform on earth — just as tens of millions of students in South Asia and Southeast Asia are being told to learn online with no internet.

The perception gap you're not seeing

The framing split is stark.

US and European media covered the NSF investment, the AI tutoring research, and the Coursera-Udemy merger as stories about the future of education. Optimistic. Forward-looking. Solvable.

Pakistani media covered school closures as an emergency measure — sandwiched between fuel price panic and cricket matches moving behind closed doors. Reuters quoted Pakistan's Prime Minister: "We closed schools and instituted work from home."

Southeast Asian media covered the closures as part of the energy crunch. The Diplomat noted fuel shortages in Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand, with "out of stock" signs at petrol stations. Schools weren't the headline. They were the second paragraph.

The education story the world is paying attention to is about AI. The education story most of the world is living is about fuel.

What happens to a school year that loses three weeks?

Pakistan's notification says exams will proceed as scheduled. Let that sink in. Students who haven't had class in three weeks will still sit their exams on time.

For children already enrolled, three lost weeks compounds. Research consistently shows that learning loss from disruption doesn't recover on its own — it accumulates. Pakistan already carries scars from the COVID school closures, which the World Bank estimated cost the country 1.5 years of learning-adjusted schooling.

But the deeper damage hits children on the margins. In rural Balochistan, where female literacy sits below 20%, a three-week closure isn't a pause. It's an exit ramp. Families weighing whether to send daughters back after a break often decide not to.

UNICEF's pre-crisis data shows Pakistan has 26.2 million out-of-school children — the second highest figure in the world. The fuel closure adds millions more to the temporary count. How many of the temporary absences become permanent is the question no one's modelling yet.

The uncomfortable bridge

The split between AI-tutoring-as-salvation and fuel-rationing-as-reality isn't just ironic. It's connected.

The same Hormuz blockade driving Pakistan's school closures is disrupting semiconductor supply chains — the chips that power AI tutoring platforms, the servers that run Coursera, the devices students need to access any of it. Helium shortages threaten chip fab output by mid-April. The AI education future assumes a stable supply chain that this war is dismantling.

And the $11 million NSF investment, while real, serves 500,000-600,000 students. Pakistan's Punjab closure alone affects more students than that.

One country is training teachers to teach AI. Another is closing schools to save the fuel that powers generators. The question isn't which approach is right. It's why the world only talks about one of them.

What to watch

Pakistan's closure expires March 31. If Hormuz stays contested, expect extensions. The Philippines' class suspensions are expanding. Lebanon's daily toll on children has no end date.

Meanwhile, the Coursera-Udemy shareholder vote on April 9 will decide whether the world's biggest reskilling platform arrives just in time for a generation of students who can't get online to use it.

Education crises don't announce themselves with a single headline. They arrive as fuel rationing, mobility restrictions, and quiet three-week "holidays" that nobody outside the affected country notices.

Right now, tens of millions of children aren't in school. Not because of a policy failure or a teacher shortage. Because diesel costs too much for a bus to make the run.