Elaine Unterhalter

Elaine Unterhalter

Aims of the chapter • To analyse what the key concepts of the capability approach – capability,

functioning and agency – imply for educational theory and practice. • To examine education as a human development dimension and in its role in promoting other valuable dimensions. • To understand the differences between the human capital and human development

approach to education. Key Points

• Human capital theory sees the role of education as being instrumental to economic growth. Education provides people with the necessary productive skills that an industrialized economy requires. Education is an investment that yields economic returns.

• In contrast, the human development and capability approach sees education as fulfilling three roles: it is instrumental, empowering and redistributive. • Education nurtures critical reflection and has crucial links with a healthy democracy. • Applying the capability approach to the field of education puts the emphasis on

capabilities and not only on functionings. It stresses the importance of conversion factors and diverse institutional arrangements for educational inputs to be translated into valuable outputs.

• Education has critical links to social justice.

Previous chapters have examined the human development and capability approach and how these ideas affect our understanding of central development topics, such as economic growth, equality, measurement, markets and demo- cracy. Ideas are central to shaping policies and, indeed, ‘changing history’, as Chapter 3 has discussed. 1

TOPICS

But no new ideas can emerge without educated minds. Education is the driving force of change in the world. Education (which is not always the same as schooling) brings empowerment. Without education, people can be subject to abuses by the most powerful. For example, illiterate peasants can be driven off their land by those who have access to legal instruments which they cannot influence. A woman, who does not have access to other points of view, may never come to question the arbitrary authority her husband has over her. Without education, people may be constrained to find menial jobs that do not fulfil them and others will look down on those who perform these jobs. Without education, those who are marginalized or oppressed may not have the resources to denounce the injustices they suffer from and to claim their rights.

Education is thus central to human flourishing. It not only opens the mind to further horizons, it also opens the way to acquire other valuable capabilities. The Human Development Reports accounted for the central importance of education by incorporating an education indicator – literacy rates – into the first Human Development Index; later versions have included education indicators based on enrolment rates. There is, however, much more to education than a literacy or school enrolment statistic. This chapter analyses education as a key dimension of human development. It starts by examining how education became a concern for development in the 1960s. Education was seen as an instrument for economic productivity. This approach – known as human capital – is still prevalent today. The chapter then contrasts human capital with the human development and capability approach to education. It describes how its key concepts of agency and capability introduce new ways of considering the role of education in development.