Cutting the Internet Is an Attack on Education

Key Takeaways

• Attacks on education are counted as physical events: bombed schools, occupied buildings, teachers abducted. Network shutdowns produce comparable damage and rarely get counted at all.
• Education systems adopted remote learning as their standard fallback after 2020, which means continuity now depends on a connection a government can switch off.
• In Afghanistan, where 2.2 million girls are banned from classrooms, the internet had become their remaining route to education. The Taliban cut it four times in 2025.
• Six countries shut down internet access during school exams in 2025, disrupting entire populations in the name of exam integrity.

There's a well-established way of counting attacks on education. A school gets shelled, and it goes in a report. A teacher is abducted, and there's a case number. A student is killed walking to class, and the incident is documented, named, and raised in diplomatic forums.

Then there's a second category that produces similar outcomes and almost never gets counted. A government issues an order, and the network goes down across a region, and the classes that had moved online stop. No building is damaged. Nobody appears in a casualty figure. Learning ends anyway, for as long as the order stands.

The International Day to Protect Education from Attack is this week, September 9th, which makes this a great time to ask whether the definition of an attack has kept pace with how education actually works now.

Education Became Network-Dependent, Quietly

The pandemic settled a question that had been open for years. Education systems can survive a physical closure if the network holds. Millions of students learned from home for months. It worked unevenly, and it worked.

That left a permanent change behind. Remote and hybrid learning is now the default contingency plan when a school can't open, whether because of disease, displacement, flooding, or war. Education ministries build it into their planning. Teachers get trained on it. Families reorganize around it.

The plan has one dependency. It assumes there's a connection.

The Global Coalition to Protect Education from Attack's Education Under Attack 2026 report documents attacks on students, teachers, and educational facilities in conflict zones worldwide. Physical attacks remain the core of the problem and the core of the reporting. But in a system where the fallback runs on connectivity, an order to cut the network produces a version of the same outcome through an entirely different mechanism, and it doesn't register in the same way.

Afghanistan Shows the Mechanism Clearly

The clearest case is also the hardest to read.

Four years after the Taliban barred girls from secondary education, UNESCO reported in 2025 that 2.2 million Afghan girls remain banned from school. For a significant number of them, the internet had become the only route to an education that remained: online courses, remote classes run by teachers outside the country, and materials that existed nowhere they could physically reach.

In 2025, the Taliban imposed four internet shutdowns across Afghanistan, cutting off more than 43 million people at regional and national levels. According to Access Now’s report on internet shutdowns in 2025, authorities justified the cuts as necessary to curb immorality. The practical effect was to sever the last connection to information that women and girls barred from classrooms and workplaces had left.

Two decisions, working together. Close the classroom, then cut the alternative.

UNESCO's own research on tech-assisted learning for students who can't attend school in Afghanistan examines how technology can reach learners cut off from physical education. That work assumes a functioning network. Where the network is itself a political instrument, the assumption collapses.

The Exam Shutdowns Are Their Own Problem

In 2025, six countries shut down internet access specifically during national school exams: Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Sudan, and Syria. The reasoning is to prevent cheating. 

Iraq imposed six separate shutdown instances corresponding to exam periods between May and September, producing 36 nationwide disruptions. Kenya blocked Telegram during national secondary school exams for the third consecutive year. Sudan, in the middle of a catastrophic civil war, shut down mobile internet nationwide in July during part of the exam period.

Think about what that trades away. To stop some students from sharing answers, a country loses hospital coordination, business transactions, emergency communication, and access to information for hours or days.

It's also worth asking what it actually protects. Not education, particularly. The students sitting the exam lose the study resources they were using the week before. Students in other years lose class time. And the state establishes, as a matter of routine, that education is an acceptable reason to switch off national connectivity, which is a precedent that outlives any individual exam season.

The Definition Needs to Catch Up

I think the category of what counts as an attack on education has to expand, and I don't think that's a rhetorical stretch.

A missile that hits a school and an order that cuts remote learning across a region produce different images and a similar result. Children who were learning are no longer learning. One gets documented in international reporting, condemned in statements, and raised with governments. The other gets recorded as a connectivity incident, if it gets recorded at all.

The Safe Schools Declaration commits states to seek the continuation of education during armed conflict. Continuity is the operative word in that sentence. Today, continuity in a crisis means the network stays up, because that's what every contingency plan is built on. A government that signs that commitment and then orders a shutdown during an emergency has not kept it, regardless of how the shutdown is classified.

The same logic governs humanitarian response, where cutting connectivity disables the coordination that keeps people alive. Education belongs in that conversation for the same reason. It stopped being only a building some time ago.