( CNN ) -- `` All around me my friends were lying injured and dead . '' These are not the confessions of a battle-hardened soldier who signed up to fight in his nation 's war . They are the words of a 15-year-old boy lying in a hospital bed in Peshawar , Pakistan , after Taliban militants attacked his school in an act of savagery so bloody and brazen it seized the attention of a world grown nearly indifferent to the barbarism vying regularly for its attention . At a time of playground bombings in Syria , kidnapped schoolgirls in Nigeria , girls ' schools shuttered under threat in Afghanistan and conflicts descending into chaos in real time , the attack on the Pakistan 's Army Public School brought home once again the danger children face simply for the act of heading to school . Are we ready to watch schools become the new front lines ? It is a question we all must answer . The Peshawar attack was not a one-off . It was simply larger and even more horrific than previous carnage . `` In 2013 , 78 attacks against schools , teachers and schoolchildren were reported to the United Nations in Pakistan , '' a news release from the U.N. 's special representative for children and armed conflict noted . This morning , condemnations poured in , including one from a global leader who knows firsthand such deadly violence . `` I condemn these atrocious and cowardly acts , '' Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai said in a statement . Two years ago , the Taliban shot the Pakistani teenager at close range on her school bus in retaliation for her eloquent advocacy for girls ' education in Swat Valley in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa ; its capital is Peshawar , site of Tuesday 's attack . Nor is the violence new . Armed conflict increasingly has made the world 's children its front lines . In a wrenching interview , a girl named Margaret tells of being abducted from her girls ' school in northern Uganda in 2004 at 14 by soldiers for Joseph Kony . She was forced to become his sex slave and to bear his children , one of countless children forced into soldiering and slavery by Kony 's Lord 's Resistance Army . As schools become battlefields , the need to protect them has never been greater . Indeed , education is one of the most potent weapons in the fight for global stability and security . Another Nobel Prize winner , economist Amartya Sen , has written that there is no clearer route to economic development and , ultimately , to peace than education . In 2011 , 57 million children were out of school ; half of them in countries that are home to armed conflict . And that should concern everyone who wants to see a world that is stable , peaceful and secure . And yet , today in Syria millions of refugee children remain out of school . A `` No Lost Generation '' campaign to fund education and support for these children is under way but remains vastly underfunded . `` Before the war , almost all of Syria 's children were enrolled in school , '' according to the charity Save the Children . Today , `` Syria now has the second worst enrollment rate in the world with almost 3 million school-aged Syrian children no longer in school . '' At an event in September hosted by U.N. Education Envoy Gordon Brown , frustration was palpable . Everyone agreed that education was key to guaranteeing that millions of Syrian children had a chance at a future . But getting the world to open up its wallet when it came to keeping them in any kind of classroom has proved more challenging . One of the people fighting for that safer world is Beatrice Ayuru Byaruhanga , founder of the Lira Integrated School in once violence-riddled northern Uganda . Herself a groundbreaker -- as a woman who graduated from college -- Ayuru grew and sold cassava to fund a school that would fight illiteracy and poverty and battle for the rights of children to stay in the classroom . `` During the war , we would always run with the children from school to the town to hide them , '' Ayuru told a reporter . `` Then , during the day we collected them from town again to come and have lessons . '' Ayuru would not be cowed by the violence around her . Nor would Malala Yousafzai . `` I , along with millions of others around the world , mourn these children , my brothers and sisters -- but we will never be defeated , '' Yousafzai said in her statement . That resolve will be required for the fight ahead . The militants have shown they will stop at nothing to take the fight to the Pakistani Army . And they have made clear the stakes . Those who care about the future not just of their own children , but the stability and prosperity of the world they will inherit , must agree that the world needs a lot more Malalas and Beatrice Ayurus if there are to be fewer blood-soaked days like today . And they must fund , support and speak out for the right of every child to have a classroom that does not double as a battle zone . It is a shared fight . And one in which we all have a stake .
Angela Lemmon : Peshawar attack was n't a one - off ; schools have been attacked often . She says the bloody , brazen attack has seized the world 's attention . Lemmon : Are we prepared for schools on the front lines of a barbaric battle ? We must speak out for the right of children to freedom and peace , she says .