A School Should Be More Than a Building

This week’s Field Notes challenged me to rethink what it actually means to protect a school during war. Across the ICRC, Human Rights Watch, and Norway’s Safe Schools initiative, one idea became clear: a school can remain physically standing and still lose its ability to protect childhood.

The ICRC showed how conflict can pull children from classrooms into armed groups, where they may be used as fighters, messengers, spies, or lookouts. Human Rights Watch revealed another form of intrusion in Russian-occupied Ukraine, where education itself can become a tool of conflict through restricted Ukrainian-language learning, surveillance, propaganda, and militarized programs. In both cases, the boundary between education and warfare disappears without a bomb ever hitting the classroom.

The broader global picture makes this even more urgent. HRW reported at least 8,500 attacks on education across 83 countries in 2024–2025, while the military use of schools exceeded 1,900 cases. These figures suggest that protecting schools cannot begin only after destruction. Once soldiers, weapons, recruitment, or political coercion enter educational spaces, children’s rights are already being compromised.

Norway’s role in advancing the Safe Schools Declaration offers a different perspective: protection can move from principle to policy. Its approach demonstrates the importance of building international commitments, encouraging states to restrict the military use of schools, and most importantly asking whether those commitments are actually implemented.

Taken together, these cases redefine what a “safe school” should mean. Safety is not simply having walls that remain intact. It means protecting a child’s right to learn without recruitment, coercion, fear, or military interference.

This also gives Megaphone a more demanding model for advocacy: make violations visible, examine the promises made to prevent them, and ask whether those promises are changing young people’s lives. Protecting schools during war ultimately means protecting the boundary that should always separate childhood from conflict.