"JUST one extra year of schooling makes someone 10% less likely to attend a church ..."
mosque or temple, pray alone or describe himself as religious, concludes a paper published on October 6th that looks at the relationship between religiosity and the length of time spent in school.
By comparing people of similar backgrounds who were among the first to stay on longer, the authors could be reasonably certain that the extra schooling actually caused religiosity to fall, rather than merely being correlated with the decline. During those extra years mathematics and science classes typically become more rigorous, points out Naci Mocan, one of the authors—and increased exposure to analytical thinking may weaken the tendency to believe.
Another paper, published earlier this year, showed that after Turkey increased compulsory schooling from five years to eight in 1997, women’s propensity to identify themselves as religious, cover their heads or vote for an Islamic party fell by 30-50%.
And a study published in 2011 that looked at the rise in the school-leaving age in Canadian provinces in the 1950s and 1960s found that each extra year of schooling led to a decline of four percentage points in the likelihood of identifying with a religious tradition. Longer schooling, it reckoned, explains most of the increase in non-affiliation to any religion in Canada between 1971 and 2001, from 4% of the population to 16%.
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21623712-how-education-makes-people-less-religiousand-less-superstitious-too-falling-away?fsrc=rss|int
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