This paper reviews the research literature on educational development and changes of education policy for development in Cambodia throughout five historical events from the 1860s to the 1980s. Secondary data such as scholarly journal articles and books were gathered through the search in databases of ERIC, Science Direct, Google Scholar, and library. Content analysis was adopted as the analytical method. The authors argue that even though educational provision has been embraced as the important policy for development, it has been found to be fundamentally misguided. From the 1950s to 1960s, the significant expansion of education brought rapid growth of economic and establishments of schools, universities, and teacher training colleges. However, the crisis of education emerged from the decline of education in the early 1970s and the total dismantle of education during the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) by the second half of the 1970s. It has damaged many of Cambodia development prospects.