Too Hot to Handle by Jonathan Zimmerman

Author:Jonathan Zimmerman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2015-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

POPULATION EDUCATION

So sex educators and family-planning advocates went in search of another phrase, which would avoid both the lascivious, pleasure-seeking tone of “sex” and the coercive, secularizing connotations of “family planning.” They found it in population education, which became the most common venue for sex education in many parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The concept was actually born in Sweden, where the 1935 Population Commission called on schools to help increase the nation’s moribund birth rate by encouraging early marriage and larger families. American demographer Frank Lorimer and military official Frederick Osborn urged a similar educational effort in 1943, fearing that declining fertility rates in North America and Europe threatened economic prosperity and national security. But when population education resurfaced in the 1960s, it had the opposite goal: to stem population growth. Building on the burgeoning environmental movement, American educators urged schools to teach about “overpopulation” and its “disastrous consequences for mankind”: pollution, famine, and war. The effort yielded scattered pilot projects in the United States, but little else; instead, it took hold abroad. “We must have experience here before trying to export,” a skeptical American observer cautioned in 1971, noting the low level of domestic interest in population education. “If we cannot convince a State Department of Education, how can we convince LDCs?”38

The acronym “LDCs” referred to Lesser Developed Countries, where advocates found a much more amenable audience for population education. Indeed, another American asserted in 1971, population education was “unique” insofar as it was “not a curricular pattern being exported from technologically developed societies to developing countries.” He was only half right. Although population education never took root in US schools, Americans—and, especially, American foundations—played a key role in planting it overseas, fired by a fear of overpopulation. In their public pronouncements, officials from the “Big Three” foundations—Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie—warned that unchecked population growth would yield mass starvation and disease; privately, they worried that nonwhite people would overcome white ones. At the same time, though, they realized that population control could not succeed unless it appealed to the very populations whose growth they dreaded. Population education would get Third World people to want smaller families, the foundations hoped, even as it protected the West’s hegemony over the wider human family. In some countries, one Ford Foundation official wrote, Americans might collaborate with “responsible public sector organizations” to promote population education. But in places where “the public sector is not ready,” he added, foundations could partner with friendly private organizations. As in the United States, another Ford representative wrote, “enlightened” people favored sex and population education and “unenlightened” people did not. The key was to locate and cultivate the first group and avoid alienating the second, both inside government agencies and beyond them.39

Here the foundations often partnered with American universities, a centerpiece of the “Big Three” vision of global progress and modernization. Funded by two large grants from the Population Council, which had been founded in the 1950s by John D. Rockefeller III, Teachers College (TC)

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