The demographic benefits of secondary education
Brendan Maher
Tuesday, 25 November 2008 13:47 UTC
Among the many benefits of secondary education, says Joel E. Cohen a professor of populations at the Rockefeller University and Columbia University in New York, is a noted decline in fertility, one that could have dramatic beneficial effects on world population by 2050. Read this week’s commentary here (access should be free for the month of December).
Do you think this is a compelling reason to push for universal access to secondary ed?
Updated 04 December 2008 14:25 UTC
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Replies
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Not another one…!
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I think it’s probably the same one.
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This is a different one.
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Thanks for the comments anticipating our content on this page. So that we may print a URL in the magazine, we have to create these pages ahead of time. I didn’t think anyone trolled the Nature Opinion Forum regularly enough to notice. But I’m glad to see people are paying attention. Now, read the commentary and tell us what you think.
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I think it is my fault, Brendan. I have a lot of contacts on Nature Network and they saw when I posted a similar forum “in anticipation” the other day! Apologies.
Turning to this particular commentary, it is an interesting read and of course a worthy goal. I mean, who could disagree? However, I wonder to what extent the author is writing from a comfortable Western perspective? He acknoweldges in a brief phrase that families may require their children to work early. That is putting it mildly. Is any international organisation (or anyone) prepared to actually pay families what they could get from sending their secondary school age children out to work? (Or selling them as young brides etc).
In the UK some of this has begun to happen under the much-derided Labour government. I know several students whose families are below a threshold income level who are being paid by the government to stay at high school from the ages of 16 to 18 (i.e sixth form) to attempt to prevent them quitting and getting a (presumably dead-end) job or claiming benefits. However, this is much derided and many times I have heard it said that the students who take the money are those who would have stayed at school anyway, and those who wanted to leave (or were pressured to leave), left.
One thing I am sure of is that there are no simple solutions to these questions – just “writing” or “saying” the right things won’t cut it. However, I fully believe that a good education is the potential saviour of anyone who does not have a decent start in life, eg they come from an impoverished or cruel background or culture. And not much else is. I was fascinated by the Constance Briscoe case that has just been in the high court over here. What an amazing woman.
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