Education Under Attack Means More Than War

Each year on September 9, the international community marks the International Day to Protect Education from Attack. We condemn bombed schools, occupied classrooms, and violence against students and teachers. We should. But our definition of an attack remains too convenient.

It allows governments, donors, and humanitarian organizations to denounce the visible destruction of education while treating other forms of educational exclusion as unavoidable. A school destroyed by a bomb is recognized as an outrage. A school closed indefinitely because of discriminatory policy, climate vulnerability, or years of inadequate investment is more often described as a “challenge.”

For the child who can no longer learn, that distinction offers little comfort.

If we are serious about protecting education, we must confront an uncomfortable truth: education is threatened not only by those who deliberately target schools, but also by institutions that know children are being excluded and continue to fund, plan, and operate as though the disruption were temporary.

Afghanistan: When Policy and Faith Are Weaponized

Afghanistan is one of the clearest examples.

Five years after the Taliban returned to power, girls remain excluded from secondary and higher education. UNESCO estimates that approximately 2.4 million Afghan girls have been denied access to secondary education, making Afghanistan the only country in the world where girls and women are formally barred from education beyond the primary level. The number could approach four million by 2030 if the restrictions continue.

“The international community has rightly condemned this policy. Condemnation, however, has become a substitute for strategy.”

After five years, we should be willing to ask whether repeating that girls have a right to education—while millions continue to be denied it—constitutes an adequate response. Statements of principle matter, but principles that do not change conditions can become a ritual through which institutions demonstrate concern without confronting their own ineffectiveness.

The use of religion to justify these restrictions must also be challenged more directly.

“Denying girls an education is not a defense of faith. It is the use of faith as an instrument of control.”

Faith leaders and faith-based institutions should not limit themselves to saying that exclusion is inconsistent with their values. They should use their religious authority, relationships, educational networks, and political influence to contest it. If multifaith engagement cannot confront the misuse of religion in a case as consequential as Afghanistan, then we should ask what that engagement is for.

Climate Disasters and the Illusion of Natural Exclusion

But political repression is not the only way education is lost.

Recent glacier-related flooding in Nepal destroyed homes, infrastructure, and entire communities. At least 18 schools were destroyed and another 20 damaged, according to UNICEF, leaving approximately 10,000 school-age children in urgent need of support.

No armed group targeted those classrooms. Yet we should be careful about calling the resulting exclusion a natural disaster.

Floods may be natural hazards. The failure to prepare schools, protect continuity of learning, and finance recovery before disaster strikes is not. Climate change may intensify the threat, but political and institutional choices determine whether a damaged building becomes a brief interruption or the end of a child’s education.

There is almost always a decision behind whose education is restored quickly and whose is allowed to disappear. These are not accidents, but rather choices made by those who hold power.

The Broken Architecture of Bounded Emergencies

For decades, the international community has organized education responses around the idea of a bounded emergency: crisis strikes, aid arrives, stability returns, and development resumes. That model no longer reflects reality—if it ever did. In many places, crisis does not end. It compounds. Conflict is followed by displacement, displacement by economic instability, and instability by floods, droughts, or political upheaval.

Yet our systems continue to divide children’s lives into humanitarian and development phases. Funding is short-term. Programs are designed around grant cycles. Innovation is celebrated in pilot projects but rarely financed at the scale or duration communities require. When emergency funding ends before stability arrives, we describe the resulting gap as a problem of coordination.

It is also a choice.

“The education sector often calls for resilience while continuing to finance fragility.”

We ask communities to adapt, but preserve funding and decision-making systems that are themselves resistant to adaptation. We praise locally created solutions while requiring them to conform to priorities, timelines, and measurements developed elsewhere.

Protecting education cannot mean repeatedly rebuilding the same vulnerable system and congratulating ourselves for restoring it. Nor can it mean offering temporary learning programs with no credible path to recognize qualifications, livelihoods, or influence over the institutions that govern children’s futures.

It must mean treating continuity as a non-negotiable obligation before, during, and after a crisis. That requires financing that survives the news cycle; plans built around recurring disruption rather than eventual stability; and greater authority for the people who understand the risks because they live with them.

Redefining Protection: Accountability Beyond Bullets

Most importantly, it requires accountability.

On this International Day to Protect Education from Attack, armed groups must certainly be held responsible when they bomb schools. Governments must be held responsible when they exclude girls. But donors and international institutions should also be answerable when predictable funding is withdrawn, rigid mandates are instituted, or years of underinvestment leave children without realistic access to learning.

These actions are not morally identical, and we should not pretend they are. But neither should we use those differences to absolve institutions whose choices contribute to the same outcome: children losing years of education they will never recover.

“An attack on education is not only the moment a classroom is destroyed. It is also the sustained denial of the opportunity to learn—and the collective decision to tolerate that denial once the initial emergency has passed.”

Protecting education therefore requires more than defending schools from bullets. It requires asking who benefits from our narrow definition of attack, who escapes accountability because of it, and why millions of children are still expected to wait.