Prescription of a common syllabus for all children in Pakistan is the demand of social activists. The author feels that this is not a feasible proposal at this time as there is a huge gap between the life experiences in the two worlds that exist within Pakistan ---the world of the privileged and the world of the deprived. Children of the poor fail to develop certain essential pre-literacy skills (Zafarullah, 1996) and are therefore unable to compete with their more fortunate counterparts. These underprivileged children lack an orientation towards literacy: 1. They lack certain essential pre-literacy skills, 2. Their home language is different from the school language, 3. They lack the motivation to become literate. Privileged children, on the other hand, have few such shortcomings. In fact they are overly motivated, competent and competitive in the area of school learning. Hence, if we have a combined syllabus we will either have to downgrade the educational standard of the advanced children (bringing them down to the level of the backward children) or up-grade the disadvantaged children and take them closer to the level of their more fortunate counterparts. The second option is obviously more desirable. This paper briefly describes some of the methods employed by the researcher to rapidly upgrade under-privileged children before and during elementary schooling. These methods have been implemented and tested by teams led by the researcher and have proved dramatically successful.