Returns to Parental Investment in Children in Benguet Province, Philippines

Abstract

Caldwell has postulated five mechanisms by which mass education affects families, resulting in lower fertility. His data are from the West, India, and subSaharan Africa; our data base is Cairo, Egypt. Supported are four of Caldwell’s mechanisms: reduction of children ’s work potential, increased cost of children, p_rolonged dependency of children on family, and the school system’s speeding of cultural change. However, Caldwell’s fifth mechanism, propagation of Western middle-class values, is not wholly supported, particularly because of Islamic values concerning parental authority and influence, strongly promoted by Egyptian public education curricula. We hypothesize that this educational influence of the Islamic Revival may be a cause of the. faltering, in recent years, of Egypt’s population control program which had made promising start after the 1952 Revolution.