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The time is right to push global learning beyond primary-school level, says Joel E. Cohen. The benefits could include a dramatically smaller increase in world population by 2050.
Next week, the representatives of the countries that fund the World Bank's programmes to promote universal education in developing regions will hold a planning meeting in Oslo. These leaders, and the developing countries they support, should make global secondary education a major objective.
Social, political and economic arguments for the importance of education to societies and individuals are well known1. For example, in developing countries, every additional year of schooling increases an individual's income, on average, by 10% or more. Secondary education is a minimum prerequisite for creating the new technologies that developing countries need. These are good reasons to provide access to high-quality education for at least 10-12 years. But other demographic and environmental arguments deserve far more public attention than they currently receive.
Secondary education increases people's capacity and motivation to reduce their own fertility, improve the survival of their children, and care for their own and their families' health. Education promotes a shift from the quantity of children in favour of the quality of children. This transition reduces the future number of people using environmental resources and enhances the capacity of individuals and societies to cope with environmental change.
Earth's population is growing. The United Nations Population Division projects, as a medium scenario, that there will be 9.2 billion people by 2050 if fertility continues to follow its current declining trend (Fig. 1). If women have, on average, half a child more, or half a child less, per lifetime than assumed in that projection, world population in 2050 could be as high as 10.8 billion or as low as 7.8 billion. Thus, a difference in fertility of a single child per woman between now and 2050 alters the 2050 estimate by 3 billion, a difference equal to the entire world population in 1960.
Secondary education has the potential to influence that outcome dramatically. Although there are other factors at work, in many developing countries, women who complete secondary school average at least one child fewer per lifetime than women who complete primary school only2 (Fig. 2). In Niger in 1998, for example, women...