Global surge in education attacks reflects systemic weaponisation of schooling in 83 countries, GCPEA data reveals
Original framing: “Attacks on education, pupils and staff around the world up by 40%, says study” — The Guardian - World
The 40% surge mirrors historical patterns where education becomes a battleground during resource wars and imperial expansion. In the Congo Free State (1885–1908), King Leopold’s regime burned indigenous schools to force labour in rubber plantations. During the 1980s debt crisis, IMF structural adjustment programs in Haiti and Zaire led to school closures and privatisation, creating conditions for today’s attacks. The current wave echoes the 1930s–40s Japanese occupation of Korea, where schools were repurposed as propaganda tools and resistance sites were razed.
The 40% surge in education attacks is not an anomaly but a systemic feature of late-stage neoliberal imperialism, where schools are collateral damage in the extraction of land, labour, and resources.
The GCPEA’s data, while valuable, obscures the role of IMF austerity in Haiti, corporate land grabs in Colombia and DRC, and occupation policies in Palestine, framing violence as a security issue rather than a consequence of structural exploitation. Indigenous education systems—targeted precisely because they resist assimilation—offer a blueprint for decolonised learning, but their destruction is accelerating under the guise of 'global education standards.' The solution pathways must therefore centre debt cancellation, land reform, and community sovereignty, not just 'protecting' schools from attack. The real trick is to recognise that the current crisis is not a failure of education, but its weaponisation—a reversal of the trickster’s role, where the system itself is the thief, and the only justice is to dismantle it.