Education is becoming one of the leading elements in geopolitics, the economic strategy of states, and an intellectual and cultural factor in the development of human civilization. During the past twenty years, many experiments were executed, legal and illegal, to control population expansion. With the growth of knowledge of the population and understanding of life’s value, such methods became ridiculous and unacceptable for the world community. That’s why we have to find a different way to control population growth.
One of the methods is the increasing status of women, their education, and diversifying women’s placement in critical government and science positions. Past experiments were showing that the education of women is one of the effective methods. Statistics say that when a woman is better educated, she is more interested in having a small family with only one or two children. When girls are getting a school education, they often get married much later than non-educated girls. On average, they are getting married in the 25th year of life. On the other side, those who don’t get an education and do not visit the school already have 2-3 children at the age of 25. In 2010 in Kerala, India, women got married in their 28th year of life thanks to the tradition of female education. On average, they had one child. Simultaneously, in Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, or Bihar, a local woman got married on average in the 18th year of life. Based on the India example, it is unnecessary to apply aggressive policies to manage the population, but it can be manageable via education. In a world where women have access to education and can self-control their lives, people are getting smarter and dying later.
With the population growth question, we are getting statistics signals that stabilization has already started. In the last 50 years, the speed of population growth has slowed down a bit. Globally, the volume of children per woman decreased from 4,5 in 1970 to 2,5 in 2000. These days in the USA, Europe, China, and even in a few states of India, it is less than 2. Moreover, the fertility rate should not increase above 2.1 in order to stop population growth. Also, in a few countries in Africa, we can note the decreasing birth rate trend with the population’s increasing education level. Many African women stop on 4 children compared to the situation 20 years ago when it was 6. The further steps of African citizens will probably go in the same way as the USA and Europe already passed and will give birth to fewer and fewer children. The prediction says that by 2050, the population level will reach a peak of 9.5 billion people. And it will be maximum. Due to the higher education level of the population, the population growth will stop, and we will decrease the volume to 8 billion by 2100. But with a better-educated population, we will struggle with another problem.
A more educated population creates a more comfortable environment for themselves and starts to consume more. A bit tricky, isn’t it? That’s why, along with higher education, we have to think about the culture of moderate consumption. That’s not a simple task. Many raise the question of why population growth occurred in the past 200 years, even in countries with higher economic progress and higher education levels. The answer is simple. The population growth was caused not by the volume of births but by decreasing the number of death cases. Improvement of global health, food, and physical infrastructure, and decrement in crimes had a strong and positive impact on the duration of human life. So, it happens that more people were born and older people didn’t die. That’s why we became so populated.
Generally, we don’t need to be afraid of overpopulation because we already have technologies that can help us survive healthily and with the necessary comfort level. But what we should be afraid of is the current direction of the civilization managed by corporations, advertisement sociology project that leads people to consume. That’s a more complex problem, as people themselves cannot impact elite groups’ greed. Why? Because of the economic system.
