by Gavin Moodie and Leesa Wheelahan
The developers of the capabilities approach Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum argued that education is fundamental to expanding peoples’ capacity to understand and act in the world and thus lead the kind of lives they value and have reason to value.
Capability for education is the freedom to choose a curriculum or a course one has reason to value, that will support students to develop their emerging conceptions of how they want to live their lives, and provide them with the educational foundation that is necessary to do so. This offers higher education an alternative rationale to human capital theory that has dominated post-secondary education since the Robbins Report of 1963, but which has been losing its appeal as the return on investment in higher education has been plateauing.
Moreover, the value of and confidence in qualifications, particularly higher education qualifications, has been diminishing because they are perceived to no longer deliver on the promise of a good job with good career prospects. If the value of higher education qualifications (and indeed, all educational qualifications) are evaluated only by the extent to which they ‘deliver’ on labour market outcomes, then their value will be questioned. However, qualifications have multiple purposes which, of course, include, but cannot be limited to, labour market outcomes.
Students’ capabilities are advanced by higher education with multiple complementary values, and this helps us to consider the enduring value of and importance of qualifications. Qualifications have intrinsic value for students to realise their self to ‘be’ in the world and to live a life they have reason to value. Qualifications have educational value for accessing the knowledge needed for students to participate in debates and controversies in society and in their field of practice and to proceed to higher levels of education.
Qualifications have use value as a necessary foundation for an occupation and an occupational identity, and exchange value to access the labour market and contribute to an occupational identity. Qualifications also have social value for democratic, socially inclusive communities and society. These different forms of value lead us to posit that qualifications for the capability approach have four purposes, while recognising that different types of qualifications will fulfil these purposes in different ways:
- Individual, to develop individuals’ agency to live lives they have reason to value, and to contribute to their families, communities, society, and occupation;
- Educational, to develop graduates’ and society’s understanding of theoretical, abstract knowledge;
- Occupational, to develop graduates’ individual and work groups’ collective productive capacity; and
- Social, to advance society, and social justice and inclusion.
Education should include students’ capability for voice – the capacity to express their wishes, expectations, desires, and concerns, and to have them count when decisions concerning themselves are made. Bonvin related the capability for voice to Appadurai’s ‘capacity to aspire’ or ‘to project oneself in the future’. A capacity to aspire is important because people adapt their preferences according to what they perceive to be achievable. In contrast, education should take account of students’ different capacities and aim to develop their capacity to transform themselves, to increase their agency, to expand their choices about how they wish to live. Thus, ‘the development of capabilities requires the ability to construct one’s preferences (capacity to aspire), to voice them and make them count (capability for voice)’.
Post-secondary education should seek to develop students’ voice in their education, work and wider society. Education should extend its application of these principles to the workplaces where students undertake work integrated or work-based learning. However, trainees may have less scope to exercise their voice at work than on campus.
Collective capabilities
Sen argued that ‘[T]he basic building blocks’ of the capabilities approach is ‘the freedoms of individuals’. Sen is interested in expanding individual liberties and he called his book developing his capabilities approach Development as freedom. But individuals’ freedoms and capabilities are constituted not just by their individual circumstances, but by their membership of social institutions which themselves have varying capabilities. Most basically, the social institution of the family greatly affects members’ capabilities, and reproduces not only people, but differentiated capabilities of successive generations of family members.
Yet families have their own capabilities depending, for example, on their literacy and levels of education, which in turn provides different resources upon which family members can draw. Families have unequal levels of economic, social and cultural capital, which is shaped by relations of class, gender and race and other dimensions of power. Education is collective in three ways, through peers, occupations, and social change. The peer effect is a social multiplier, whereby adults share knowledge with their neighbours and those with whom they interact, developing their peers’ knowledge. This educative role is also collective in building social institutions such as schooling, participating in post-secondary education, and credentialing, although some have argued credentialing has been excessively institutionalised. Education’s educative role is also collective in developing educational organisations such as libraries, educative websites, public lectures, and community education, all of which play a particularly important role in education for adult working learners and other members of the community.
Universities are strongly institutionalised – the idea of a university, of an undergraduate, a lecturer, and a degree are widely understood and reinforced by norms and expectations, despite local variations and changes over time. Universities have strong roles in building and extending social institutions of education and related institutions for the advancement of knowledge and promotion of rational inquiry. Postsecondary education organisations and their staff and students also contribute to the educational, social and cultural leadership of their communities by participating formally and informally in local associations, committees and boards. This develops ‘networks of civic engagement’, which develops communities’ capacity for collective action. Through this post-secondary education institutions anchor their communities by developing knowledge and skills within their region; establishing links and exchanges outside the region; contributing to civic, political, cultural, and social activities and networks in their region; developing facilities and amenities used by the community; and, contributing to their region’s economic activity. Gertler and Vinodrai add that universities foster tolerance, openness and social inclusion:
“First, the university plays an important role in shaping the quality of place and fostering openness and tolerance in the community. Crucial to this process is the ability of the university to create a social environment that is open to dialogue and debate, tolerant of different viewpoints, and accessible to many different social, ethnic, and cultural groups (locally, nationally, and internationally). In other words, the university has a role in reducing ‘barriers to entry’ and working towards social inclusion.”
Capability for higher education at three levels
Thus, higher education develops capabilities at three levels: 1) the individual, 2) social and work groups, and 3) society. Most attention has been given to higher education’s contributions to individuals, and to society. More recently higher education has given attention to teamwork but much of this has been about individuals’ capacity to work in teams rather than the development of the capabilities of groups. The capabilities approach is also strongly applicable to adult, further, and special education, which is the subject of the next in our SRHE Blog series, and of our open access book.
Dr Gavin Moodie is Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education
Leesa Wheelahan is Professor Emerita and William G. Davis Chair in Community College Leadership Emerita at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department of Education.
