What If Education Could Save a Life Today?
Education is often valued for the opportunities it creates later in life. Yet INEE’s discussion of “lifesaving learning” draws attention to a more immediate role: in an emergency, the right knowledge can protect a child from danger. During the first three months of 2025 alone, at least 188 children in Syria were killed or injured by landmines and explosive remnants of war,an average of about two children each day.
Humanitarian education can help children identify and respond to the risks around them. Depending on the crisis, they may learn how to recognize unexploded weapons, react during armed violence, evacuate safely, perform basic first aid, or protect themselves during floods and disease outbreaks. These lessons do not depend on a conventional classroom. They can be delivered in schools, temporary learning centers, or any space where children can gather safely.
This raises an important question about how humanitarian aid is prioritized. Food, shelter, and medical care are rightly treated as urgent, while education is often postponed until conditions become more stable. However, this distinction overlooks the protective role that education can play. An ordinary lesson may help shape a child’s future, but learning to avoid an unexploded device may determine whether that child has a future at all.
Education cannot remove the dangers created by war, displacement, or disaster, nor should it be treated as a substitute for governments’ and humanitarian organizations’ responsibility to provide physical protection. But when lessons are designed around the risks children actually face, education becomes part of the emergency response itself. The right to learn and the right to survive are not separate concerns; in a crisis, they can be inseparable.
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