Curriculum Tweaks: Population
June 2023
When tasked with designing the final subject-specific session of our SCITT programme, I quickly decided to end the year by thinking about the future of geography. I wanted to ensure that this cohort of trainees (the first that I’ve led through the SCITT) had considered the future of geography both as a discipline and a subject to teach. I wanted to ensure that they recognised how quickly the world changes around us and what this means in the context of our classrooms.
In this blog, I’m going to share one element of this training and hope to provide some food for thought around our teaching of population and demographics ahead of September. I pose some questions that might be useful to reflect on and consider with our departments to ensure that our teaching is as up to date as it can be.
2023 has been a big year for the global population. This year India has overtaken China as the world’s most populous country. The significance of this can get lost when talking about two countries each with a population of over 1 billion people but it really does mark the end of an era: the first time since the 1950s that a country over than China has held this title.
There are a number of reasons why this is significant and symbolic:
It signals the start of China’s population decline- and their population is going to contract far faster than anything experienced elsewhere.
Although demographics are just one element of superpower status, it signals a possible wobble in China’s exponential rise in status throughout the 21st century so far.
Effectively, China is in a race to get rich before it gets old.
Of course, most of our geography teacher teams will know of this change through the news but I wonder if it’s worth spending some time as a department thinking about the significance of this change. Firstly, are there any resources that now need updating? Secondly, when and how will you discuss the implications of this with students? More broadly, what does this mean for our teaching of China?
Most of us have become accustomed to teaching about China as the world’s factory- as a global hub of manufacturing and industry. However, the future China will be much more. Sharing 2021 data, the Economist recently reported that China’s increasingly affluent 1.4 billion inhabitants now account for a quarter of global sales of clothes, nearly a third of jewellery and handbags, and around two-fifths of cars. I wonder how we can ensure that we’re exploring this rising demand from China in our teaching.
As China becomes increasingly affluent, the wage costs are rising such that manufacturing there is starting to look increasingly uncompetitive. If you get students to look at the labels in their clothes, you can start to notice this. The ‘Made in…’ labels have diversified away from China and now include Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Right through from A-Level to KS1 we’ve become accustomed to referring to China as the main producer of our ‘stuff’ but are we and our teams aware of this shift and changing our language accordingly? Because to ignore this change risks presenting a single story of China as the ‘workshop of the world’ that it once was- without the nuances of its changing status as an increasingly wealthy country.
Thinking about global population more broadly, global fertility rates are changing (falling) much more quickly than geographers had previously predicted and anticipated. In 2021 there were 124 countries with fertility rates below replacement level. By 2030, this is set to reach 136. Teaching about over-population as a possibility now looks outdated and I think that we need to reflect on our teaching and resources to ensure that students recognise what is happening to birth rates and fertility rates globally. That’s not to say that teaching the concept of over-population does not have value but that we need to recognise the new reality globally.
This podcast from the Economist is the best that I’ve heard on the topic thus far and really got me thinking. When discussing these dramatic changes to fertility rates around the world, one of the main points made was that fertility rates below replacement level are no longer just a rich country problem. Thailand and Brazil have fertility rates of 1.3 and 1.6 respectively and India’s fertility rate recently fell below 2.1. How are we going to teach the nuances of the relationship between fertility rates and income when that relationship isn’t as simple as we might have once taught? What does this mean for our teaching of the Demographic Transition Model?
Finally, what about the impacts of an aging population? Whilst we’ve long taught about dependency ratio and the impact on public spending of increasing pensions and healthcare requirements, I wonder whether it’s time to broaden our discussion of impacts. One key point made in the podcast is about the fall in innovation that is likely with an aging population. Could this be an opportunity to draw a link to climate change? Considering the innovative solutions that are needed to deal with the climate crisis and how an aging population might hinder such innovation?
As I hope is evident from this blog, recent events and changes give us plenty to think about when tweaking curriculums and resources for next year. Rather than being daunted by this though, I think it represents an opportunity to work with colleagues on what makes teaching geography so great: the ever-changing nature of our world!