Population Education

The relationship between education and population has attracted the attention of both scholars and policymakers, especially since the mid-1970s. The rate of population growth and the number of people living on earth have both increased spectacularly since the beginning of the nineteenth century. During the twentieth century, the human population increased at an average annual rate that was about fifty times as fast as the rate over the previous 10,000 years. Between 1800 and 2000, the number of people alive increased nearly seven-fold. Following World War II, the rate of population growth exploded - during the 1970s it was about four times as great as it had been a century earlier. By 2000, the living population exceeded the entire population born between the beginning of settled agriculture and the year 1900 - a period of 10,000 years.
The implications of this explosive growth for both the physical environment and human wellbeing alarmed many observers and prompted an intense public policy debate. Many scholars and policymakers noted that high levels of educational achievement were associated with more moderate rates of population growth, suggesting that important opportunities for alleviating population pressures might be found in ensuring greater access to education, particularly for females. The ensuing public policy debate has prompted an examination of how education affects the birth rate.
The explosive growth of the human population in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the result of a historically unprecedented decline in the rate of mortality, rather than an increase in the birth rate. The proportion of children dying before reaching the age of five fell from nearly one in three in most of the world to less than one in one hundred in the most advanced societies over this period, and to one in ten in low-income countries. In