Critical Perspectives on Schooling and Fertility in the Developing World (1999) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 1-22
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The second half of the twentieth century in particular has seen immense transformations in both the educational and reproductive expectations of young people in the developing world. As of the end of World War II, women in Asia, Latin America, and Africa had few opportunities to attend school and little access to what are commonly referred to as modern methods of fertility control.
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In cross-country analyses, a generally consistent inverse relationship appears: women with more schooling have lower fertility than those with less (Adamchack and Ntseane, 1992; Ainsworth et al., 1996; Castro Martin, 1995; United Nations, 1995; Jejeebhoy,1995~.1 The assumption of a causal flow from education to fertility has led many governments to support women's education not only to foster human rights and national development, but also to reduce fertility rates, promote the use of modern contraception, and improve child health. Indeed, a pressing need to educate girls for precisely these reasons was one of the strongest messages emerging from the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo: The increase in the education of women and girls contributes to greater empowerment of women, to a postponement of the age of marriage, and to a reduction in the size of families (United Nations, 1994:Ch.
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Those who see girls' education as a route to lower fertility can point to countries on both ends of the education-fertility continuum as evidence. Sri Lanka has unusually low fertility rates for a low-income country (total fertility rate [TFR]
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In high-fertility contexts, for example, small amounts of education have been hypothesized to undermine lengthy postpartum breastfeeding and sexual abstinence that in previous times would have delayed a new pregnancy (see, e.g., Lesthaeghe et al., 1981:16-21~. Alternatively, these unexpected findings may reflect the ability of educated women to achieve their numerical reproductive goals, whether these are goals of high or low fertility (Cleland and Kaufmann, 1998~.4 As Diamond et al.
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that larger proportions of women correctly identify the most fertile period in the ovulatory cycle in countries where average levels of schooling are higher. Yet across countries, the correspondence between knowledge of the fertile period and fertility rates is quite low.
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The problem is that the literature provides little direct evidence for these speculations or, indeed, for the socializedactor explanation of innovations in fertility behavior. More serious is a logical conundrum concerning the perceptions of those who send children to school: Why would parents enroll their children in school if they know it is a forum where children will be encouraged to reject parental values?
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(1994:304) point out, the processes by which learning experiences may produce demographic behaviors remain mysterious: Among the least understood processes are those that mediate the effects of school experience during childhood on the behavior of adult women as mothers and reproductive decision makers in Third World countries.
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In this view, education and its effects on social institutions and cognitive processes are taken as central objects of study: literacy is seen as increasing individualism, writing is seen as creating detachment because it is not context dependent, and literacy is seen as enhancing communication in extending it beyond face-to-face interaction and reducing dependence on memory for storing and retrieving information. Variants of this theory of cognitive modernization regard education, especially in its function of teaching literacy, as fundamentally altering basic forms of thought.
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With respect to issues of fertility, these observations imply that students who learn their national language may well become better equipped to acquire family planning/economic resources by employing their language skills or gaining bureaucratic connections. Yet information on issues such as fertility regulation can travel independently of education and even of the national language, if the context demands.6 An example of how the local context shapes the meaning and fertility impact of education (or, more broadly, training)
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It has been noted repeatedly, for example, that education is strongly related to the use of modern contraceptives, itself one of the strongest correlates of reduced fertility rates (for some recent figures, see United Nations, 1995:69~. What has gone virtually unnoticed in such analyses is a clear increase as well with education in the use of "traditional" forms of contraception.
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. Furthermore, while it is tempting to see as rational the kinds of behaviors that Western schooling is said to induce, few analysts would argue that educated women, though more frequent users of traditional contraception than uneducated women, are more "irrational" in their reproductive decision making than are their uneducated counterparts.
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Prominent examples come from the realms of employment and marriage (Heckman, 1976; Smith, 1980; Axinn and Thornton, 1992~. Yet beyond its application to the question of sampling errors, the notion of selection offers a sociological handle for addressing the question of education and fertility in the developing world, insofar as it may reflect the outcome of intentional social actions to recruit certain people into, or filter others out of, one pool or another.
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The possibility that observed sortings may represent outcomes of intentional social actions implies that the removal by families of certain women from the elite pool of continuing students may even occur with the intent that their future life will be channeled toward high fertility. Similar forces of selection arise with respect to admission standards for students seeking transfer to a new school or reentry after a hiatus, issues of singular importance to women who seek to resume their schooling after childbirth.
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Chapter 2, by Ian Diamond, Margaret Newby, and Sarah Varle, summarizes some recent empirical evidence, primarily from the DHS on the education-fertility relationship. The authors review a broad array of studies, positing that while primary education may affect fertility indirectly, by mediating the effect of various factors, secondary and higher education may influence fertility more directly by making people "more able to make independent decisions based on an assessment of the likely costs and benefits of different actions." They also ask, however, how the same measure of schooling can lead to very different fertility outcomes depending on the social, economic, and political circumstances.
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In Chapter 6, Thomas examines important empirical evidence concerning a possible mechanism through which the negative association between education and fertility might develop. He finds that among women in South Africa, reading comprehension skills are strongly associated with lower fertility, quite indepen
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Women who leave school at natural breaks, such as those between primary and secondary school, have lower fertility than would be predicted if the schooling-fertility relationship followed a linear dose-response pattern. Thomas suggests that the women who leave school at natural breaks differ in systematic ways from women who leave at other times, meaning that processes of selection out of school may constitute a significant factor in the education-fertility relationship.
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Men who marry educated women, therefore, are largely in agreement with the low fertility aspirations of their educated wives well before the marnage. In a concluding review in Chapter 10, Parfait Eloundou-Enyegue notes the parallels and contrasts in some of the themes of this volume with regard to questions raised 20 years ago in Cochrane's (1979)
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1980 Mass education as a determinant of the timing of fertility decline. Population and Devel opment Review 6(2)
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Freedman, R 1995 Asia's recent fertility decline and prospects for future demographic change.
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Chamratrithirong, and N Debavalya 1987 Thailand's Reproductive Revolution: Rapid Fertility Decline in a Third-World Setting.
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Kamens, and A Benavot 1992 School Knowledge for the Masses: World Models and National Primary Curricular Categories in the Twentieth Century.
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New York: United Nations. 1995 Women's Education and Fertility Behaviour: Recent Evidence from the Demographic and Health Surveys.
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