Literacy, Education, and Fertility, Past and Present: A Critical Review

In this article I wish to reexamine the proposed relationships between education and literacy and fertility behavior and goals. I discuss both contemporary studies and those few historical attempts to specify and explain the nature of the relationship and the role of literacy and education in changing patterns of fertility. In so doing I offer a critical commentary on these studies and their results specifically seeking to elaborate how education is conceptualized as an independent variable. I contend that the common ways or the paradigmatic manner in which education is viewed accounts largely for the role it typically is found to play. In this way critical questions about the analysis of fertility data are raised and critical perspectives on the role of literacy and education discussed. Through such a prism the results of different studies will be reviewed and an attempt made both to reexamine the relationships found commonly and to inquire into the important differences in patterns of results. We begin with a review of the received wisdom the rather general consensus on education or literacy in fertility studies and its qualities. (excerpt)