Carola Canale, a Year 11 student at the International British School of Bucharest, won third prize at the international competition organized by the John Locke Institute. The awards ceremony took place on October 3 at Grosvenor House in London.
The 2026 competition received more than 100,000 essays from 183 countries, according to a press release.
Carola Canale’s essay examined the relationship between religiosity and per capita education spending, addressing the question: “Research shows a strong negative correlation between religiosity and per capita spending on education. Is one the cause of the other?”
The essay argued that official spending figures do not capture all forms of education, including the role of families, communities, and faith in developing children’s character and values.
“The village was never merely a metaphor. It was an alternative theory of education,” the Romanian student wrote, drawing on the proverb “It takes a village to raise a child.”
Her analysis considered three possible explanations for the relationship between religion and education spending: economic development, differing views of education and human development, and reverse causality between secular education and declining religious belief.
“If education truly means forming wise and fully developed human beings, rather than producing efficient workers, then the most important investments are precisely those that our financial statistics cannot see,” she wrote.
Carola Canale said the research process changed her initial view of the topic and ultimately turned the academic argument into a personal conviction.
“By the end, I was no longer defending an essay. I was defending what I truly believed,” she concluded.