ARTIFICIAL contraception and economic changes are generally believed to be the main causes of the dramatic decline in birth rates of the last two centuries. There is a strong case to be made, however, that there was at least one other important factor. The drop in fertility parallels the growth in the modern state school and the industrialization of childrearing.

Fertility in America began to drop significantly from the 1830’s onward, decreasing by 50 percent between 1800 and 1900, with the greater part of that drop occurring after 1870. Between 1870 and 1920, the American birth rate declined by 30 percent.* According to The History of Contraception from Antiquity to the Present Day by Angus MacLaren:

“In Utica, New York, for example, native-born middle-class women who had begun their childbearing in the 1820s had on average 5.8 children; those who began ten years later had only 3.6 children.”

This was a region of heavy industrialization, which was obviously a factor. But, as Steve Kellmeyer writes in his book Designed to Fail, a grim look at similar trends in Catholic education, subsequent changes in the birth rate follow the growth in compulsory schooling in state-run institutions. Kellmeyer writes:

“By the turn of the century, scientific studies demonstrated that extending the duration and intensity of schooling caused sharp drops in fertility.”

The first compulsory schooling law was passed in Massachussetts in 1852 over heavy resistance by parents. Armed troops were required to enforce the law in at least one town. Most states followed Massachussetts’ lead although schooling remained limited to a relatively small fraction of the year for the remander of the century and into the next. Child labor laws progressively limited the ability of children to participate in the economy and schooling became longer and longer, reducing adolescents in particular to what Kellmeyer calls “economic wastrels.”

The birth of the modern school profoundly altered the spiritual conditions of parenthood. Industrialized childrearing may have the same effect on human beings that forced confinement has on animals, destroying the desire to reproduce.

Modern schooling usurps the family while all the time presenting itself as benign babysitter. It robs parenthood of its underlying purpose, which is to transmit culture and the transcendent values that link the generations. Schooling itself is not evil. Parents cannot be sole teachers and guides to their children. But the modern machine is nothing like what parents experienced in previous epochs, when they seemed far more motivated to make the sacrifices to raise children. Is it possible that the state school turns parenthood into a relatively joyless enterprise, the parent reduced to an unpaid state employee and the child to an unthinking cog in a purely economic scheme? Why have children when you will only give them away and have to pay for their upkeep as well?

* These fertility figures were cited by Kellmeyer.

Please follow and like us: