Nine-year-old Soriya Thol remembers the sound more than the sight. A split second of quiet, then the thud that rattled the tin roof of her classroom at Tamoun Sen Chey Primary School in Oddar Meanchey province, Cambodia. It was July 27, the middle of the school examinations, and the day her small world, a school with six classrooms and 191 children, and a border fence just beyond the tree line, cracked open.
Within hours, the building that had stood since 2010 was torn apart by bombardments. The ceiling and roof caved in; the tiles scattered like broken chalk across the floor. By evening, the school was an exposed shell, its metal trusses pointing at the sky.
Along with hundreds of families, Soriya fled 80 kilometres to Krolanh camp in Siem Reap. The journey took hours. Her mother carried what she could; her father stayed behind for a day to secure the little they owned — the rice fields, the groceries they sold, the livestock. When Soriya reached the camp, she promptly fell ill with fever. “She’s a strong child,” her mother said later. But the shock sat in her body for days.
This would have been unbearable enough if it were a one-off tragedy, but it is not. As of December 15, a total of 1,039 schools have been closed across six bordering provinces, impacting 9,797 teachers and 24,281 students.
Videos show parents sprinting into classrooms to pull their children out as shelling continues in the distance.
Across the border, Thailand has ordered 641 schools to shut down as a safety measure.
This is the second time in less than six months that conflict has stalled children’s education in these border provinces. Families such as Soriya’s have barely begun to rebuild; many homes still stand amid debris and the remnants of exploded ordnance.
This latest round of violence also comes at a time when the world has celebrated Human Rights Day (December 10) recently; and barely three months after we marked the International Day to Protect Education from Attack (September 9). The irony is painfully clear. While our calendars are full of commemorations, the cycle of assaults on schooling refuses to pause. What is unfolding in these borderlands is just one pin on a much wider map of children steadily being stripped of their right to learn.
As of early 2025, 85 million children worldwide are out of school due to wars, armed conflict, and emergencies — a steep rise from 72 million in 2023. More than 52% are girls, and over 17 million are children with disabilities. At least 15 million are forcibly displaced, living as refugees or internally displaced persons.
Nearly half of these children are concentrated in just five crises zones: Sudan, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Pakistan.
For children such as Soriya, the impact of conflict on education isn’t just numerical. She dreams of becoming a teacher. She likes reading more than anything. In the camps she scavenged for books from the Cambodia Consortium for Out of School Children (CCOOSC)project’s mobile classroom. She attended makeshift refresher lessons under a tarpaulin tent. She read to distract herself from the sounds of gunfire she still imagined.
When she finally returned home after the ceasefire in August, her house was half-destroyed. Rain leaked through the roof. Their daily income plunged from the US$30-$50 they once earned selling goods to roughly US$5. Her mother used to buy small internet data packages so Soriya could keep up with online lessons; now even that is uncertain.
Following the July attacks, teachers were teaching and counselling simultaneously. They shouldered the emotional labour of calming children who have seen too much, while urging them to focus on learning. But with a second wave of attacks hitting the same border districts last week, much of what teachers, NGOs and government officials painstakingly rebuilt over recent months risks collapsing back to zero.
The makeshift classrooms set up in pagodas, the mobile libraries, the refresher lessons arranged village by village, all the fragile scaffolding created to keep children learning, seem to have been lost in a single afternoon of shelling. Continuity of learning depends on stability, and in regions where conflict returns in cycles, every gain is provisional, and every effort is vulnerable to being undone overnight.
Such a pattern of violence and conflict is being seen globally now, when schools were bombed in Gaza, or entire districts were left without functioning schools in Sudan. Conflict is not only targeting communities, bit by bit, but it is also dismantling the opportunities children need to build their futures.
Also, when millions of children lose years of education, the consequences ripple outward — societies lose health workers, teachers, engineers, small business owners, caregivers and community leaders — each a backbone of recovery. Recent events show how already fragile countries have been sinking deeper into instability, and the cost of rebuilding has been rising.
If days such as Human Rights Day are to mean anything, education must stop being treated as optional, a line item that can be deferred while the world focuses on “more urgent” crises. If we are to rebuild, including after conflict, stakeholders must recognise that the right to education is the foundation of every other right.
Somewhere in Oddar Meanchey tonight, Soriya is waiting for her school to rise again. And her story, multiplied by 85 million, is the clearest signal that the world is running out of time to act.
