School is for Making Babies

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

The most powerful force of change on the planet is a girl

While the main thrust of this post is to point out that conservatives leading America’s education reforms today promote various schooling policies in order to “increase the married birth rate,” there’s some important background radiation that I think ought to be covered first. There is, I think, a kind of horseshoe nature to views of fertility and how they relate to education. So, we’re going to take a quick detour to the world of international aid and development and talk about work that’s been done since roughly the 1970s to bring down the world’s birth rate. We may not realize it, but one of the important things schools do is manage women’s bodies and teach them to manage their bodies in accordance with the desires of the state or of international organizations like the UN or the World Bank. Managing women’s bodies, we’ve been told, is among the most important things a country or a society can do. It makes sense to me that a radical change in thinking about education here in the US would give a lot of attention to managing women’s bodies and their fertility.

One thing I should make clear is that I am not necessarily objecting to the international development policies that are being invoked here.1 I think a world in which women are educated and have bodily autonomy is a good world and one worth pursuing. I’m not a Malthusian or a proponent of degrowth. If anything, I am probably even pro-natalist in some ways, if only that community wasn’t taken over by a weird creepy white supremacist project. That creepiness is sort of why I’m starting with the world of global development, though. It’s not hard to find videos, for example, of Bill Gates talking frankly about young girls’ bodies and their need to be in school so they don’t have babies. Let’s call it edu-fertility policy, the use of education to manage fertility for nations or regions. The Gates Foundation spent a lot of time and energy both implementing edu-fertility policies and promoting data gathering mechanisms to inform global policy makers and help them reach their fertility goals.

In the mid twenty-teens a term for this tendency emerged: the girling of development. The basic idea is that companies, non-profits, and NGOs and the like all coalesced around the idea that the solution to many of the problems faced by the “Third World” was the birth rate and since women give birth we need to stop them. A negative relationship between educational attainment and fertility has been well documented throughout modernity so the mechanism for lowering fertility was education. Send girls to school, get fewer babies. One of the challenges, though, is that girls attended school at much lower rates than their boy peers. Another avenue had to be found to accomplish edu-fertility goals.

I think it’s fascinating that some of this push for schooling came through youth sports supported by corporations and NGOs. Sports served as a way to accomplish educational goals that would, in turn, drive down fertility. In one of the interviews conducted as part of the study we get a good picture of what connects schooling, sport, sanitation, and menstruation. Here we have a manager for one of these corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives talking about the complexities:

MNC is anonymizing the multinational corporation behind this particular initiative, in case that wasn’t clear. What I think this illustrates is the practical side of the big theories. Because this company supports the international development consensus that girls in schools leads to fewer babies, they promoted sports and education and ended up building bathrooms and menstrual product factories to further that goal.

It’s not strange for schools to be about fertility

Why am I bringing all this up, though? I usually do not write about education outside of the US but this whole girling of development thing is worth mentioning for two reasons. First, when conservatives in the US talk about trying to increase fertility or use education to promote women staying home and having babies, people in the US act like it’s really crazy that anyone would even make those connections. For someone in a wealthy country, schooling is not usually thought of as part of managing population demographics. Schools are for job training or humanist pursuits or warehousing children, not for fertility! Indeed, even the idea that schools teach sex ed is highly controversial.

When we acknowledge that schools deepest purpose is state-building, it all becomes much clearer. Part of what schools do is create the institutions of the state. Those are not just government institutions, they can be social and cultural institutions, too. Development work is not necessarily about state-building or nation-building so much as world-building. Something like the Millennium Development Goals is about bringing the whole world closer to standards of living and economic production we see in wealthy countries and they do that by utilizing state institutions like schools but also the powerful corporate and charitable institutions that operate out of wealthy developed countries. And they’ve all decided that the best thing to do is lower the birth rates in the poorest countries by bringing girls into state institutions so that those institutions can manage their bodies both materially and educationally.

This brings me to my second point. If we look at the mechanics of how all of this is supposed to work, we can see the similarities with what’s happening in the US quite clearly. Clearly a big part of this whole thing is, as I’ve said, managing women’s bodies and training them to manage themselves in ways that accord with whatever the dominant socioeconomic goals are. Look at the other pieces above: sports, education, gender roles, wellness and hygiene. Doesn’t this sound all a bit familiar to US readers?

Sports. Education and gender roles. Wellness and hygiene. The policymakers may be conservatives but the mechanisms by which they want to make social change are the same as any international development initiative. Just like in the international development world, girl’s are seen as the key to institutional and social change in the United States. If a radical project is needed to remake American society, it happens in the education system and acts upon the women and girls there.

What if number go up?

Unlike subsaharan Africa where the goal is to lower population growth, America needs more children. Societies struggle economically and socially if the old too dramatically outnumber the young. Whether it’s direct care or something implemented by the government and paid for by taxes, the young care for the old. Moreover, it’s hard to fund (personally, privately, or through government programs) care for the old if there are too few productive young people around. America, like Europe and east Asia, are facing something of a demographic aging crisis. Because we need the number of children being born to go up, conservatives have stepped into the lack of liberal and left response with a new set of policies to address the lack of babies.

Namely, they want to totally fuck up the education system so that women don’t go to college and, instead, choose to marry men and have babies. If educational attainment makes fertility go down, conservatives cogitate, then educational nonattainment makes fertility go up. It appears they really believe this. For today’s conservatives, education policy appears to be the key to solving our demographic woes. Crucially, though, they don’t want just any babies. They need babies born to mothers in marriages. There are a couple of specific planks to their policy proposals and we see those planks being implemented in the actual policies of the Trump administration.

First, people are delaying “family formation” because they are spending too much time in school and college. Therefore, the government should cut student loans, especially to graduate schools. They should also reduce requirements for educational credentials such as teaching certificates or needing bachelor’s degrees so that people can enter the labor force more quickly.

Second, Americans need more religiosity because religious people have more babies. Therefore, the government should fund religious schools and allow for more school choice so parents can send their kids to schools that share their values.

Lest you think a single Heritage Foundation policy document is some kind of edge case, do note that the second author of that piece, Lindsey Burke, wrote the education section in Project 2025, the highly influential blueprint for the second Trump administration. Today Burke is the deputy chief of staff for policy and programs at the Department of Education where many of those reforms have been implemented. Indeed, the education section of Project 2025 may be the closest to being fully implemented of all their policy guidance. For example, it did not escape me that the recent limits on student loan borrowing and the removal of many degree pathways from the “professional” categorization hits women-dominated degrees the most and will result in women being excluded from many advanced degrees.

That’s the point! Did we forget that personnel is policy? The lady who wrote the proposals is now implementing the policies she wrote. We’re using education policy to drive fertility up. That’s what’s behind so many of these changes. School choice? It’s for fertility. Student loans? Make babies instead. Women in the workforce? Women at home raising Christian children and educating them with government funded religious curriculum.

To close out, I have one other comparison to draw between conservative education reform and international development. In the world of international development, various agencies and NGOs often fill in the “gaps” for what developing-world governments can’t or won’t do. One one hand, this is great because it provides much needed services but on the other hand, the presence of outside sources of aid reduces incentives for local governments to build up their state capacity. Critics of aid and development warn that this creates dependencies where the state continues to shrink services, expecting independent agencies to come in and provide them. Apply that logic to schools. As vouchers and other similar choice schemes expand, school budgets are stressed. Schools can’t provide services so the public, already increasingly wary of public schools, flees to private, home, and micro schools and pulls in voucher money to cover those costs. It creates a vicious cycle whereby vendors and curriculum sellers and edTech companies end up overseeing the educations of a larger and larger portion of students because they can provide the replacement expertise that used to reside in schools but without the accountability of public schools. While we tell ourselves that the ultimate responsibility is on the parents to make the best choices, we’ve abrogated all responsibility at a societal level and are reducing our capacity to ever have societal level responsibility in the future.

So, no, it’s not strange for school reformers to be focused on fertility and family formation. Families are a core social institution that conservatives believe should organize society and, given our current demographic slump, offer a stable home for future Americans, if only the government would stop incentivizing women to do anything other than get married and have kids. Toward that end, conservatives are looking at the same state-building mechanisms we see prioritized in international development when they want to depress fertility; only, this approach is about raising fertility. Women’s bodies, their autonomy and freedom of choice are being limited in the US and schools are the fulcrum for this whole social engineering project. Education policy is now reorganized as edu-fertility policy and addresses the need for more babies, preferably in wedlock.

Thanks for reading!