Many people live in your locality. They belong to various social, gender, caste and age status from a small child to the people of dying age, poor people to millionaires, males and females and so on. These people are living in a certain territory. All these people constitute population. Population refers to to a collective group of organism of the same species occupying a particular space. In a broader sense, population may be defined as a set of members taken at a time in an area.
Population size never remains constant. It is detrimental to social, geographical and economic factors of a particular place.
Population growth has become jeopardy in the present context. When a child is born, she/he comes with an ‘extra mouth’ but we cannot expand the land to feet him/her. The same land should be shared for the provision of his/her requirements. It brings chaos in social, economic and environmental sectors. Major threat to modern age is uncontrolled population and massive destruction of environment, resulted by it. People still feel proud to make family size larger due to lack of education that teaches about the advantages of having family size small, controlling of birth and so on. Therefore, education concerned with these subject matters is a must. Population education serves all these functions. The term ‘population education’ was coined by Slon Wayland of Columbia University of the USA for the first time in 1969. He associated the word with awareness related to population problems.
The definition of population education is as diverse as its educators. An attempt to find a single genuine definition is, therefore, in vein. However, all definitions agree on the common ground, i.e. population education is related to awareness about the burning issues of population situation, reasons for population growth and mitigating measures to minimize these all. The first regional workshop on population and family life held in then UNESCO regional office, Bangkok defines population education as an educational programmes which provides for a study of population situation in the family, community, nation and the world with the purpose of developing rational and responsible attitudes and behaviours towards that situation.
The definition clarifies that study of population is the basis of population education and the goal of this subject is to create awareness towards that situation. It is directed modifying and altering behaviours and attitudes related to population, marriage and family life.
Population education is a multi-dimensional subject matter because it includes the elements and topics that belong to other subjects like family planning, health education, economics, and population statistics and so on. For an example, demographic study, and environment are related to science whereas the study of occupation and economic development and others are related to economics. Similarly, social norms and values are the common topics of culture and ethics. Human sexuality and reproduction is the part of sex education, demographic study of population measurement falls under population statistics and the study about contraceptive devices and birth spacing are the parts of family planning. Population education includes all these elements in its study. Population education is, therefore, not merely family planning education, sex education or population statistics but it incorporates the subject matter from all these areas.
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