Skill Book | Shane Gorski / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
The fact that you can read this article makes it likely that you, like 7.2 billion people worldwide who completed primary education, remember spending much of your childhood at school.
Learning is, by definition, challenging, and those of us reminiscing about childhood may also remember the stresses of grappling with math or desperately hoping to make new classroom friends. School is supposed to be a safe space for children to face and meet such challenges. And while much of our learning happens outside of the classroom, most of us agree that schools are crucial spaces for nurturing and protecting children’s creative exploration, social development, and intellectual growth.
Unfortunately, many children around the world don’t get this chance. Instead, the stresses of their school days are surviving gunfire, avoiding unexploded ordinances, or evading recruitment into paramilitary groups. The tragic truth is that military groups and regimes are increasingly treating schools, which should be refuges for children, as targets.
In their 2024 Education Under Attack report, the Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack, an interagency organization dedicated to protecting schools from war, reported that from 2022 to 2023, attacks on education settings and military occupation of educational facilities increased 20 percent compared to the two years previously, and that over a period of 12 months more than 10,000 students and teachers were killed, injured, abducted, or otherwise harmed—a rise of 10 percent compared to the previous year.
This trendline will almost certainly experience another sickening jump in 2024. In Gaza alone, nearly 10,000 students and over 400 educational staff have been killed by Israeli attacks, and an additional 15,000 students and 2,400 educators injured during the same period. Data collected in July 2024 show that 85 percent of all school buildings in Gaza have been directly hit or damaged by Israeli strikes, leaving more than 625,000 students with no access to education and 22,500 teachers out of work. Child protection officials report similar circumstances in Ukraine, Lebanon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Myanmar, where armed forces continue to purposefully target schools, students, and their teachers with the aim of disrupting their enemies’ future by destroying their children’s schooling.
Each and every one of these assaults is in violation of international law. The right to education, for example, is enshrined in Article 28 and 29 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which demands that every child has access to education, particularly primary education, so they might develop their “personality, talents, and mental and physical abilities.” Sadly, these international conventions are proving toothless in contemporary global conflicts. Israel, which signed the CRC in 1991, has proceeded to destroy the overwhelming majority of schools in Gaza; Russia, a ratifying party when the CRC was adopted in 1990, nonetheless continues to attack schools, teachers, and children in Ukraine.
These attacks are not only devastating for young students to endure in the present; assaults on their education circumscribe children’s futures. Most obviously, children who are forced out of the classroom due to armed violence lose access to structured learning spaces. The majority of children who experience violence in schools are forcibly displaced to new countries or communities, where they often then find they have fallen behind academically, making it difficult to reintegrate. With their schools destroyed, the options for children who decide to stay at home are severely limited: boys regularly end up in the workforce and girls marrying. More extreme yet, in places like Yemen, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, children who have dropped out are commonly recruited into combat service by the very armed groups that occupied their school in the first place.
Perhaps less obvious are the psychological effects attacks on education can have on students. In cases where schools and students are the direct targets of armed conflict, students report elevated rates of toxic stress. A robust body of research shows that children aged 0 to 8 who have experienced toxic stress due to armed conflict and disaster exhibit elevated rates of depression, heart disease, and chronic anxiety later in life, and are significantly less likely to learn reading, writing, elementary math, and basic social skills.
The good news is agencies like the United Nations Children’s Fund, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees are investing more heavily in educational aid than ever before, providing displaced communities with “Rapid Education Response” and “Learn at Home” toolkits that help bridge gaps in students’ learning. Similarly, philanthropic foundations, national non-governmental organizations, and community-led organizations, like Sesame Workshop, Caritas, Amna, and iACT are filling aid delivery gaps by sharing open-source classroom media, organizing safe learning spaces, and training community members to be more effective teachers and caregivers under difficult circumstances.
A notable success story in educational aid is the accelerated education campaign for displaced communities in the Sahel region of Nigeria, an area where nearly half of all children have been forced out of school due to conflict. Designed to help out-of-school children catch up, accelerated education programs build partnerships between humanitarian aid organizations and local governments to provide older children with intensive classroom learning over a short time frame, complementing their formal schooling and providing grade appropriate matriculation pathways into host community schools. Accelerated learning programs being implemented by organizations like FHI360 and the Jesuit Refugee Service train local teachers in student-centered and multimodal literacy, math, and social-emotional learning pedagogy, while also keeping students out of the workforce by providing their families with livelihood support like food, clothing, and school fees. Over the last five years, these accelerated learning projects helped more than 50,000 students learn basic academic skills, catch up to their peers, and re-enter formal schooling.
Sesame Workshop’s Ahlan Simsim (“Welcome Sesame” in Arabic) program is also a notable example of how educational aid can support hard-to-reach children in settings of active conflict. Launched in 2020, Ahlan Simsim is a multimodal initiative that produced and distributed seven seasons of an Arabic language version of Sesame Street specifically targeting refugee children, while also directly training refugee teachers in Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria to effectively deliver early learning and nurturing care to young children enduring a crisis. Ahlan Simsim has been viewed by more than 23 million children across the Middle East and North African region, helping improve many young children’s social emotional learning, and better preparing them for their transition to primary school.
Education services like these are lifelines for children displaced by violence. Unlike sources of humanitarian aid that focus on saving lives in the immediate, educational aid can help preserve people’s futures. For many communities living in conflict zones, education is of the utmost importance, as it provides hope and the power to build their lives ahead. A 2024 survey conducted by the Geneva Global Hub for Education in Emergencies showed that 29 percent of the sampled children living disaster settings said education was their top priority—more than double those who identified food (12 percent), health (12 percent), or water and sanitation (12 percent) as their primary concern and three times the number who said money (9 percent).
Reversing the trend of intensifying global scholasticide will not be easy. Education advocates must take a multi-pronged approach: campaigning for global and domestic legal agreements, new accountability mechanisms, and government funding for conflict-sensitive planning. Here, we have some good news. In 2015, the governments of Norway and Argentina led a process among UN member states to develop the Safe Schools Declaration, an international political agreement dedicated to protecting education from armed conflict. To date, 120 countries have signed the declaration—though the United States, Israel, and Russia, three of the largest culprits and enablers of attacks on education, are not among them. Pressuring nonparticipating states to sign the declaration and to fund interagency bodies protecting education has worked in the past: after years of regional human rights advocacy and domestic political pressure, the government of Australia signed the declaration in March of 2023 and has committed specifically earmarked funds for supporting education in emergency settings.
Accountability mechanisms, meanwhile, deter attacks and deliver justice to survivors, their families, and communities. The office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has taken steps in the last two years to expressly recognize the impact attacks on schools have on children around the world. And over the last five years, pressure on government policymakers has resulted in significant advancements around early warning systems, anticipatory action plans, and preparedness infrastructure for schools that might face attacks on education or other threats. These systems allow for the continuation of education in times of crisis and conflict and are crucial for community development and post-crisis recovery.
Perhaps, like me, you are finding it easy to lose hope these days, given the current state of armed violence around the world and the images of injured and dead children passing across our screens. In rare instances where life-saving aid does reach those who need it, food, water, and medical supplies only allow for immediate survival. I find myself wondering, What room is there for a future to flourish in Gaza, Ukraine, or Sudan? What room for self-actualization? One of my spiritual respites is education, because it allows us to reimagine reparative futures.
