Fascinating article by Allan Carlson in Touchstone:
In other words, far from being a danger to the planet, human fertility preserves the future. (And this is not its only benefit.) What caused this radical shift? There actually appear to be two distinct fertility transitions. The first one accounts for a shift from a “natural” level of fertility, seven to nine children born per couple, down to the replacement level of two.
The best explanation for the first transition, I believe, comes from the Australian demographic historian, John Caldwell, in his book Theory of Fertility Decline. Looking at the Western world, Caldwell attributes part of the decline to a “spectacular growth in capitalist” production and gadgets that overwhelmed residual home production, and part to Europe’s egalitarian streak, a legacy of the French Revolution. Yet the real spoiler, he insists, was mass state education, which indoctrinated new generations against the old family morality rooted in Christian faith.
The new government schools, introduced in the nineteenth century, did not only reduce the potential for child labor around the house and raise the cost of items such as children’s clothing, making children less useful and more expensive. They also became, for the children involved, the new focus of loyalty and advocate for the future, displacing the family. As Caldwell shows, the schools “made citizens of those whose horizons had been largely confined to the family, and taught the immorality of putting family first.” State schools so “destroy[ed] the corporate identity of the family,” attacking parental authority in particular, that fertility tumbled.
What was true for Europe and America soon became true for the whole world. As Caldwell concludes: “It seems improbable—and has yet to be demonstrated—that any society can sustain stable high fertility beyond two generations of mass schooling.”
Testing this theory in the United States, researchers found the spread of state schooling to be closely related to fertility decline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, even in rural school districts, each additional month of a public school year resulted in an average fertility decline of .23 children: The state schools consumed children.
....
America’s resilience can also be seen in that most unexpected, but successful, American folk movement of the last thirty years: homeschooling. Probably numbering fewer than 20,000 children in 1975, there are about two million home-educated children in America today: a hundred-fold increase. The last fifteen years have witnessed a surge in the number of Catholic families so engaged. And fertility is affected as well. As John Caldwell argued, state-run mass schooling drives fertility down. As would be predicted, homeschooling families drive it up.
No comments:
Post a Comment