Education Key To Control Birth Rate?

Yesterday, I was watching a rather stimulating (somehow controversial) documentary about "How Many People Can Live On Earth?" For those of you who are in touch with this issue, I'm pretty sure that you'll know that there are presently more than 6 billion people in this world. As it already is, the environment is already finding it difficult to supply the basic needs for humans (water, food and energy). One of the remedies that were introduced during the documentary to reduce birth rate is to educate the people especially the women.

According to the documentary, educating women can help humans control the population. The reason being: with education, women will tend to control the size of the family. It's still logical in the way that as women become educated, they aspire to provide high-quality education for their children as well. Thus, they will limit the size of the family so that each children can obtain quality education.

However, I have to say that this definitely doesn't apply fully in Malaysia. As it is, I believe that Malaysians are a fairly well-educated lot. With free education being provided in government schools, I think it is safe to say that this assumption holds true.

But the problem that I see is that many people who are educated (e.g. teachers) are expanding their family size almost every few years. It really amazes me why some of my teachers can actually be away on maternity leave for more than 3 times during my course of study in the school (5 years).

As much as contraceptives are concerned, it may just be a good way to control the family size, provided that the women are educated enough to take the contraceptives regularly. If they do not take it regularly, then they may conceive. And this adds on to the already crowded population of 6 billion.

There are times when some crazy ideas would pop into my head and I'll start thinking about a war just to reduce the headcount significantly. I know that nowadays, it's not really a physical war anymore. It's becoming more of an economic war going on and this doesn't reduce the global headcount. I have to admit that warfare has been the most effective way to reduce headcount significantly. One example is Genghis Khan to shrunk the human population by 1/10 during his reign. World War 2 is another example of a major shrinkage of world human population.

I know that some of you are thinking that I'm a sadist. If I'm given the choice of the death of millions (or possibly billions) of people or the complete annihilation of the human race, I'd definitely choose the death of millions of people. It's just a matter of which is better than the other no matter how bad both circumstances may be