Education and Population
Wednesday, February 22, 2006 at 11:54AM Education and the State
The unions are trying to shut down Toronto schools again. I suppose unions once had a place securing decent working wages during the early stages of modernization. But now they seem like protection schemes that promote an inverse ratio between work and pay. Once I was hired by the CBC to do “colour commentary” for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. There was always a fellow sleeping the day away at the back of the studio when we had to do “voice-overs” for the day’s shoots. When I asked Tom McKee, the well known CBC-TV sportscaster who the fellow sleeping at the back of the room was, he said “he’s the ladder man.” What, in the world is a ladder man? Well, Tom explained, not without cynicism: “union rules state that if we ever need a ladder, it has to be fetched by a union guy. That’s him.”
As for unions and our schools? Perhaps it serves us right, for when as families and communities we surrendered education to the state, the downward slide in education began. We need to take back the schools so that the teacher’s paymaster is the community (the families) whose kids are being educated, instead of the state. A voucher system would start us on that road: each family gets a voucher for every school-aged child that can be used to pay for any school of their choice (koo-koo schools don’t qualify). But with such a system in place (I understand Holland has done this sort of thing for some 80 years), schools and their teachers suddenly care a lot more about whether or not their clients - the families of the kids - are pleased with the product in which they have just invested their voucher. Critics hate vouchers and say the poor get hurt by them. But I say no, it is precisely the poor, trapped inside the state’s declining education system, who benefit the most. The rich already have wealthier neighbourhoods and therefore better public schools due to a higher tax base, but they also have private schools as an escape from state education. A voucher system privatizes education for rich and poor alike. A terrific book on this question of why in the world citizens of the Western world ever surrendered education to the state in the first place, is by a Canadian, E.G. West, Education and the State (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1994) originally published in 1964. A good read.
The Birth Dearth
It won’t be much longer before national panic sets in on the question of “The Birth Dearth,” which is the title of a good book by Ben Wattenberg published in the late 1980s, and warning us all that the TFR, or Total Fertility Rate of just about every Western nation except the USA has been below replacement rate for decades. The National Post along with other media in the West has been running a series on this matter lately. It’s about time. When I was at Stanford University in the 1960s one of the professors we saw jogging daily at Angell Field, was Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, which was then an enormous bestseller predicting world-wide starvation due to overpopulation by the 1980s. Everyone began talking about ZPG, or Zero Population Growth. The best antidote to Ehrlich is probably still Jacqueline Kasun, The War Against Population (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988).
All this brings to mind G.K Chesterton’s famous quip: “the answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him whether he is part of the surplus population, and if he is not, how he knows he is not?” At any rate, overpopulation devotees always run from this topic when you tell them that if we allow the space of an average coffin per person, the entire population of the world could be placed inside a crate just one mile square, and if you shoved the crate over the rim of the Grand Canyon, you would be looking down at it. (I can hear the calculators coming out!)
But it is sobering to consider that almost everyone back then echoed the overpopulation fear, despite the obvious fact that the wealthiest places on earth are its densely populated cities. Now, a mere 40 years later Westerners are facing the much more serious problem of underpopulation. All states keep statistics on birth and death rates, and dividing one rate into the other produces some interesting speculation about the future. In order for any population to remain stable, every woman must produce 2.1 children in her lifetime. But the coming disaster is already at work, and it is estimated that if trends continue Europe will be smaller by some 200 million people by the year 3000. As former French Prime Minister Chirac put it, “Europe is vanishing. Soon our countries will be empty.” Americans are still breeding enough. Barely. But Canadians are not (a present TFR of about 1.53). And both nations have been using immigration to stave off the inevitable. Immigrants do tend to have more children – until they get modernized. Then they stop breeding, too.
As what I call “The Great Die-Off” looms (anyone over 55 now will be in that group) states will hit the panic buttons and then all current policies and laws will be rapidly reversed. Now the radicalization of Western societies may have come about through ideological and political manipulation. But the return to tradition will be triggered by the practical realities of survival, and not by ideology (pace, conservatives!).
So here is my prediction: sometime in the next twenty years all Western nations will abruptly panic. In a very short order, they will create emergency social and economic policies and draconian laws, and establish new forms of political correctness to encourage much higher TFR rates. The Four-child family will come roaring back; feminism of the radical, anti-family kind will become extremely unpopular, and anyone preaching it or teaching it will become a social pariah; the practice of homosexuality, the gay lifestyle, and gay “marriage” will once again be seen as unnatural, unpatriotic, against the good of society and driven underground, if not recriminalized; huge tax relief and tax credit and school subsidy packages and mortgage relief will be created to encourage large families, and so on. Bet on it.
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