Cambodia rebuilt its teaching workforce by lowering the bar for who could stand at the front of a class. The Khmer Rouge had killed or driven out most of the country’s educators. The government that followed put anyone with almost any schooling into a classroom, and gave them a few weeks of training.
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The scale of the loss explains why. Of Cambodia’s 725 university instructors before 1975, only 50 survived the Khmer Rouge period. The country’s Ministry of Education later put the toll among college students at 96%. By the time a new government took shape in Phnom Penh in 1979, an official at the University of Phnom Penh could find only 30 or 40 Cambodians in the city with a college education.
Why so few educators survived
The Khmer Rouge treated education itself as suspect. Its leaders held that “rice fields were books, and hoes were pencils,” and argued that a country run on manual labour and political discipline had no need of schools. Doctors, lawyers, teachers, professors and former students were killed or sent to labour camps, and between 75% and 80% of Cambodian educators were killed, worked to death, or left the country.
Ben Kiernan, a historian at Yale University, put it plainly: “Anyone with a foreign education was murdered.” A Cambodian education carried its own risk, Kiernan said: people with one were suspect, and many hid their background by acting illiterate. “But that didn’t necessarily protect them, because the purges increased as time went on.”
Books went the same way as the people who read them. Soldiers emptied libraries into the streets, dumped volumes in the Mekong and burned the rest, and at least half of the written material that had existed in the Khmer language was destroyed.
The slogan that reopened the schools
The government installed with Vietnamese backing in 1979 needed teachers immediately and had almost none to call on. Its answer became a slogan: “those who know more teach those who know less.” Anyone with any level of schooling, however limited, was asked to teach. The government also went looking for former teachers, professors and education officials to help run the effort.
Training was short by necessity. New teachers received one month, three weeks, or in some cases two weeks of preparation before they were assigned a class. Many of those classes had no building to meet in. Pupils sat in shacks made of leaves with dirt floors, or gathered outside under trees.
It was rough recovery rather than a fixed system, and it showed in the numbers that followed. A survey in 2000 tested people’s writing rather than asking them to rate their own literacy. It found that 36.3% of respondents were completely illiterate and a further 26.6% semi-literate. That put close to two-thirds of Cambodian adults, or about 6.5 million people, below basic literacy two decades later. Women fared worse throughout: 45.1% were recorded as completely illiterate.
What outside help changed, and cost
Cambodia’s isolation shaped what its schools could teach. Vietnam and Russia supplied teachers and set up programmes through the 1980s, at a time when few countries outside the Eastern bloc would engage with the Phnom Penh government. One visible result: at a Phnom Penh agricultural college around 1990, students spent their first year learning Russian before they studied agriculture.
Resources stayed scarce well into the 1990s. John Dean, a librarian from Cornell University who worked with Cambodian staff to save old manuscripts at the National Library, said there was “nothing there to work with” when he arrived, down to lacking a pair of scissors. Library workers supplemented pay of a few dollars a month with a vegetable garden and cows kept near the building.
The Paris peace agreements brought a shift. Cambodia’s education budget rose to 7.7% of national spending in 2000 and 15.67% in 2001, and new donor-funded school buildings went up around the country. Higher education grew from eight public universities in 1997 to 189 institutions by 2024, according to Theara Thun, a fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute who studies Cambodia’s post-conflict education system.
An uneven legacy
The rebuilding effort left problems of its own. Thun’s research describes what he calls the “unusual growth” of PhD holders in Cambodia, including from diploma mills. One private university granted 280 doctorates in a single year even as universities struggled to find qualified faculty. He links the pattern to the Khmer Rouge era directly: many of today’s senior officials lost the chance to study when they were young, and a doctoral title later can serve as compensation for that loss.
China has taken on the role Vietnam and Russia played in the 1980s, supporting technical schools, introducing Mandarin into public curricula and drawing Cambodian families to Chinese-backed institutions. That influence “will stay there for a long time,” Thun said.
Specialist institutions have also grown up around what the state cannot fund itself. The Centre for Khmer Studies opened in Siem Reap to support scholarship in Khmer studies, from religion, philosophy and literature to anthropology. That work had drawn little of the donor money aimed mostly at restoring Angkor’s temples. Its founding director, Philippe Peycam, chose a monastery site at Wat Damnak partly for its symbolism: a strong tradition of education, and heavy damage from the Khmer Rouge. “It was the natural choice,” he said.
