My focus will be on a specific context (mass education in India) and the meaning of education in this context. I subject these universal findings from the positivist methods of social science and demography, to what may be loosely called, after Clifford Geertz, some ‘thick description’. This recommendation is not his brainchild it follows from the near universal empirical demonstration that mass education comes with a host of desirable demographic and socioeconomic outcomes. Paul Ehrlich, an author of the 1968 doomsday tract, The Population Bomb, recently acquired new fame for his mellower (compared to his earlier emphasis on population control) recommendation to increase female education to bring down population growth rates in poor countries.
Department of Sociology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
