Critical Perspectives on Schooling and Fertility in the Developing World (1999) / Chapter Skim
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3 What is Meant, and Measured, by 'Education'?
3 What is Meant, and Measured, by 'Education'?
Pages 49-79
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From page 49... ...
Carter INTRODUCTION In recent years, as fertility declines have been observed to follow or accompany large expansions of education in societies that "have not experienced marked economic growth or industrialization" (Singh and Casterline, 1985:201) , education, particularly the education of women, increasingly has been singled out as a prime determinant of fertility decline.
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From page 50... ...
In the second and third sections of the paper, I argue, first, that the autonomous concept of education pervades the literature on education and fertility change and, second, that it is unsatisfactory. In the fourth section of the paper, I sketch some of the implications of the alternative concept of education as socially situated practices for further research on fertility change.
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From page 51... ...
Where education is conceived of as the transfer of knowledge and skills into new receptacles, years of schooling completed and literacy status the ability to read and/or to sign one's name are treated as equivalent measures of the amount of education an individual has received. Where education is conceived of in terms of the mastery of decontextualized language, reading and writing also are thought to be among the primary means through which education achieves its effects.
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From page 52... ...
Instead, its effects are contingent on the historical and sociocultural situations in which it occurs. The origins of the conception of education as socially situated practices lie in a series of movements, in anthropological and psychological studies of teaching, learning, and language, across a major theoretical divide.2 On one side of the divide are positions that share a deterministic view of cognitive skills, knowledge, and teaching.
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From page 53... ...
The special character of formal schooling rests on the claim that knowledge can be decontextualized and that learning opportunities can be separated from legitimate peripheral participation. However, Lave and Wenger argue that schooling always involves a "learning curriculum" as well as "teaching curriculum." A learning curriculum consists of situated opportunities...
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From page 54... ...
The learning curriculum in schools thus remains a form of legitimate peripheral participation. EDUCATION IN ANALYSES OF FERTILITY CHANGE Analyses of the relationship between education and fertility appear to revolve around a series of disagreements.
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From page 55... ...
"The onset of fertility transition" per se is a consequence of mass involvement in formal schooling. The effects of mass education on the onset of fertility decline are macrosociological in that they involve changes in values or conventions rather than in the parameters of economic calculation.
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From page 56... ...
Education and mass media lower "the subjective costs of fertility regulation by challenging traditional beliefs and encouraging a problem-solving approach to life." They decrease the costs of contraception in both money and time by providing better information.7 (Easterlin, 1978: 110-12; Cochrane, 1979: 143-44; see also Kasarda et al., 1986:98-103~. To return to Caldwell, his macrosociological analysis is constructed around five mechanisms through which mass education affects fertility: First, it reduces the child's potential for work inside and outside the home....
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From page 57... ...
It is based on extensive direct observations as well as surveys designed explicitly to identify the missing links through which education influences fertility. In an earlier paper on the relation between culture and fertility, LeVine and Scrimshaw (1983)
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From page 58... ...
The authors propose that "schooling leads women to reconceptualize child care as a labor-intensive task requiring a great deal of her own attention throughout the preschool years and that this concept ultimately reduces her willingness to bear more than a few children." This hypothesis rests on a broad contrast between agrarian and modern industrial societies. Agrarian societies are characterized by a "protective style" of childrearing "which emphasizes physical nurturance and comfort" and by systems of apprenticeship in which learning takes place through "graduated participation." Modern industrial societies, on the other hand, are characterized by systems of formal education in which learning takes place through decontextualized verbal instruction in the classroom.
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From page 59... ...
The authors conclude "that women who attend school longer acquire a conception of child care as a laborintensive task requiring more attention for a longer period of time a conception that may contribute to child survival and impede fertility" (Levine et al., 1991:488~. The LeVines did not do home observations in rural Tilzapotla, but in their view several components of their Tilzapotla survey provide insights into the same processes.
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From page 60... ...
For girls in rural areas of countries where mass schooling is still a relatively recent innovation, this model of social interaction between an adult and children stands in contrast to their previous experience, and over time it reshapes their skills and preferences in social communication. They acquire in school and retain in adulthood skills of literacy and decontextualized language providing access to distant sources of information and institutionalized health care.
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From page 61... ...
In the primary classrooms observed by Minick, representational speech often took the form of directives. Minick argues that the seemingly decontextualized character of representational directives is more accurately seen as a contextually defined accomplishment.
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The teacher begins "to review new vocabulary before beginning to read," but several of the children again looked "furtively" at their readers. Now the teacher lowers the representational boom, emphatically invoking the listening exercise context: "Excuse me.
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From page 63... ...
describes a distinct genre of classroom talk connected with reading aloud and discussing the content of books. This genre is distinct from talk about "contextualized firsthand experiences." Like play, reading aloud and talking about reading "suspends reality, and is so framed, either through verbal or prop-type cues, that everyone knows immediately that it is not normal conversation." Reading involves "decontextualized representations of experience" insofar as it suspends the conventions in which first-hand experiences are discussed, but, as in the case of representational directives, this is a matter of reframing or recontextualization, rather than the removal of all contexts.
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From page 64... ...
Table three will wash hands first.' The Acquisition of Pedagogical Discourse These observations cast doubt on the universal validity of the distinction between informal, contextualized language and formal, decontextualized language on which the distinctiveness of schooling rests. Heath's work also undermines the LeVines' argument that women who have attended school model their interactions with young children on the interactions between teachers and children in school.
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From page 65... ...
Nevertheless, it would appear that the principal influence on their childrearing practices was their position as legitimate peripheral participants in their residential communities and family networks. Of the two kinds of distinctively contextualized speech practices observed by Heath, those involved in reading aloud and talking about reading were found in "mainstream" homes as well as in the newly integrated "mainstream" Piedmont schools.
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From page 66... ...
This view is by no means universal. Advocates of formal schooling for working-class communities in nineteenth-century England (Vincent,
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From page 67... ...
provide a rare glimpse of the educational histories of primary school children in rural northeast Brazil in the 1980s. The data are derived from a series of surveys designed to evaluate the effects of the Northeast Brazil Basic Education Project (EDURURAL)
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From page 68... ...
representation of the "possible paths for a student initially observed in second grade." If they followed the standard course, the educational histories of all primary students would carry them along the path on the extreme left of Figure 3-1. That a great many students in rural northeastern Brazil deviated from this standard path is only partly a consequence of high rates of school demise, the inability of many schools to provide a full set of primary grades, and the geographical mobility of students' families.
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From page 69... ...
1 1 Grade 4 Student drops out Grades 2&3 Student attends different school 1 1 Student in grade 4 Student in grades 2&3 Student drops out Observed in 1981-83 and 1983-85 Grades Observed in 1985-87 ~Not observed FIGURE 3-1 Educational histories in rural northeastern Brazil: "Possible Paths for a Student Initially Observed in Second Grade." SOURCE: Reprinted from Harbison and Hanushek (1992:60) with permission of Oxford University Press.
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From page 70... ...
report on a follow-up study, 16 to 17 years after delivery, of an initial cohort of 403 adolescent mothers and their firstborn children, mostly black, who participated in a program for pregnant adolescents at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland. The researchers expected that "premature" childbearing would have a negative effect on educational attainment.
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From page 71... ...
The evidence for this comes from Clelia Duel Mosher's small turn-of-the-century survey of reproductive control and sexual practices among her women patients, an extensive body of personal letters, and a few private diaries. Brodie also traces some of the connections between changing contraceptive practices and a wide range of features of nineteenth-century American popular culture and economic organization.
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From page 72... ...
There was an enormous genre of self-help or advice manuals. These included Robert Owen's Moral Physiology, a staple work in histories of the birth control debate; Charles Knowlton's Fruits of Philosophy; or, The Private Companion of Young Married People; Russell Thacher Trall's The Hydropathic Encyclopedia .
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From page 73... ...
In at least some social classes, people used personal letters to share contraceptive information with others in their personal networks of acquaintances. In 1885, Rose Williams wrote from the Dakota Territory to answer a question put to her by an Ohio friend, Allettie Mosher: how to prevent pregnancy.
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From page 74... ...
There is no satisfactory culture-free definition of education as an autonomous process of internalization. Where are we, then, if our notions of the universal cognitive consequences of education are ill-founded while the statistical support for the idea that education is a powerful indirect determinant of mortality and fertility change remains?
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From page 75... ...
calls "the vastly differential educations and outcomes made available to students by virtue of their social class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and geography" suggests that schooling has different kinds of consequences for different kinds of people. At a minimum, in large-scale quantitative studies it would be helpful to qualify measures of educational attainment such as years of education completed with some sense of the variety of individual educational histories and of the ways these weave through reproductive histories.
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From page 76... ...
1980 Mass education as a determinant of the timing of fertility decline. Population and Development Review 6(2)
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From page 77... ...
Lave, J., and E Wenger 1991 Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation.
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From page 78... ...
Seccombe, W 1992 Men's 'marital rights' and women's 'wifely duties': Changing conjugal relations in the fertility decline.
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From page 79... ...
1978 Historical Studies of Changing Fertility. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
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