Introduction - The search for a demography of education: Some thoughts

At some level, the connection between education and demography is perfectly obvious: indeed, one conceivable definition is that "education is about what one generation believes to be worth passing on to the next". But how can we get from 'Education and Demography' to 'Educational Demography'? Or, indeed, to a 'Demography of Education', and are the latter two the same thing? While it is generally acknowledged (outside of political grandstanding) that education is inherently a long-term endeavour, the full extent to which this is true is rarely recognised. If we remind ourselves that, in all likelihood, individuals will still be economically active a century (!) from now who will have been taught in school by the very teachers we are training today, it becomes clear that demographic time scales really are relevant to our thinking about education and schooling. This observation is not to say that education policy should attempt to foresee labour market conditions in the distant indeed it is debatable whether it should attempt to do so in the but it aims to provide a sense of perspective..