Weekend greetings, CharterFolk.
It is a strange thing to write about education policy on a weekend when war breaks out.
The headlines are about artillery and airspace.
About geopolitics and what comes next.
They are not about literacy rates.
It can feel almost tone-deaf, if not altogether superfluous, to send a note about schooling when the world’s attention is drawn to altogether different, and some would say much higher-stakes, matters.
And yet, perhaps this is exactly the weekend we should be writing about education.
War commands the headlines. It always has and always will.
It certainly does today, and it is understandable that it does.
But what commands headlines is not always what leaves the deepest historical mark.
The Longer Arc
A few weeks ago, I shared a post describing something extraordinary.
Namely, that over the long run, literacy in the English-speaking world has improved steadily since the late Middle Ages.
Around 1500, perhaps 10 percent of adults could read.
By 1900, it was roughly one in three.
By 1950, after two world wars, it was more than half.
Today, it is nearly nine in ten.
Across that long run, we had not seen a sustained collective move in the wrong direction.
Not during famine.
Not during natural disaster.
Not during cataclysmic war.
That five-century upward trajectory may be one of the most consequential developments in human history.
It unleashed prosperity, democratic participation, scientific progress, and human flourishing alike.
It did not happen automatically.
It happened because people insisted that children would learn, even when history turned violent.
What War Doesn’t Stop
It is an accomplishment built by Folk.
By adults who refuse to let circumstances get in the way of children learning.
Literacy even rose through World War II.
That does not mean schools were untouched. Many regions saw their places of learning utterly destroyed.
But globally, in the aggregate, across generations, the share of adults with basic education continued to climb between 1930 and 1950.
The London example is well known.
During the Blitz, schools reopened quickly after bombings. Classes met in basements. Lessons continued in Underground stations.
Children carried gas masks alongside arithmetic books.
School did not wait for peace.
But London is by no means unique.
History is replete with educators pressing forward regardless of the circumstances.
In Athens, during the Peloponnesian War, amid plague, siege, and eventual defeat, basic schooling and literacy instruction continued as part of civic life. Education did not vanish with military catastrophe.
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After the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, rabbinic leaders reorganized communal life around study. Teaching became central to Jewish survival in dispersed communities.
In China, when the Han dynasty collapsed, the empire fractured into rival kingdoms during the Three Kingdoms period. Yet village schools continued teaching the classics, and later dynasties preserved and institutionalized examination systems. Learning outlasted regimes.
In West Africa, in and around Timbuktu, Qur’anic schools endured political upheaval and later invasions. Manuscripts were hidden and preserved. Instruction decentralized but did not disappear.
During Japan’s Sengoku period, more than a century of civil war, temple schools educated children in literacy and arithmetic. When peace arrived, literacy was already widespread.
In Mesoamerica, communities required boys to attend calmecac or telpochcalli schools even amid frequent warfare. Education sustained momentum within conflict rather than collapsing beneath it.
Across continents and centuries, the pattern repeats.
War erupts.
Teachers keep teaching.
Children keep learning.
The Stories That Strain Belief
Some stories of educators helping kids learn amid unimaginable conflict defy belief.
In the slaveholding American South, John Berry Meachum, born enslaved, refused to stop teaching Black children after Missouri outlawed their education. He moved his school onto a steamboat anchored in the Mississippi River so that learning could continue.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, Janusz Korczak kept his orphanage and school operating under Nazi occupation, maintaining lessons and student self-government even as deportations loomed.
It is a legacy that extends into our own generation.
Heroic efforts in Gaza.
In Israel.
And in Ukraine.
Their stories make no headlines on the weekends when war breaks out.
But they are part of the same long arc.
War may command our immediate attention.
Folk command the progress of history.
The Real Risk of Our Moment
Which brings us to a truth more disquieting than bombardment.
Not one making headlines.
But one the most grounded people are keyed into.
Certainly we in the world of education.
We are living in a time unlike any sustained period since the late Middle Ages, a time when global learning rates appear to be moving in the wrong direction.
Not for reasons related to artillery or airspace.
But because of forces less dramatic and perhaps more insidious: the aftershocks of a pandemic, the fragility of institutions, the dispersal of attention, the dulling of urgency.
It is a warning that should be reverberating as strongly as the sirens wailing across the Middle East this week.
For the past half millennium, the defining direction of learning was up.
Today, it hangs in the balance.
Something is happening to the state of learning in our world that is directionally distinct from the long upward arc that began before Columbus set sail, before Luther nailed his grievances to the church door, and before the Ming and the Incas achieved their heights.
If we can reverse this decline and restore humanity’s upward climb toward ever greater levels of learning, it would represent a contribution as consequential as any diplomatic breakthrough or battlefield outcome that might unfold in the weeks ahead.
War will dominate the headlines.
Let it.
But let us not lose sight of the longer arc of human history.
What proves most transformative is not conflict itself, but what persists through human conflict.
Folk making classrooms safe places to learn.
Parents reading to their kids.
Children sounding out words.
On a weekend when war breaks out, it may feel odd to write about education.
That is precisely why we must.