Letters | When conflicts disrupt education, societies lose

On July 27, nine-year-old Soriya Thol was sitting her examinations at Tamoun Sen Chey Primary School in Cambodia’s Oddar Meanchey province when the shelling began. She remembers the brief stillness, then the thud that shook the tin roof of her classroom.

Within hours, the school serving 191 children was torn apart. Along with hundreds of families, Soriya fled to a displacement camp in Siem Reap, her parents carrying little more than what they could hold.

This was not an isolated tragedy. More than 1,000 schools have since closed along the Thai-Cambodian border, disrupting education for more than 24,000 students and nearly 10,000 teachers.

Globally, the scale is staggering. As of 2025, an estimated 85 million children are out of school due to conflicts and crises, up sharply from 72 million just two years earlier. More than half are girls, and at least 15 million have been forcibly displaced. Nearly half live in just five crisis settings, including Sudan, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

For children like Soriya, the impact is deeply personal. She dreams of becoming a teacher. In displacement camps, she searched in mobile classrooms for books and attended lessons in tents. When she returned home after a ceasefire, her house was half destroyed, her family’s income was reduced to a fraction of what it once was and even basic online learning became uncertain.