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Journal of Human Development and
Capabilities: A Multi-Disciplinary
Journal for People-Centered
Development
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Educating Capabilities
Elaine Unterhalter
Published online: 28 Feb 2013.
To cite this article: Elaine Unterhalter (2013) Educating Capabilities, Journal of Human
Development and Capabilities: A Multi-Disciplinary Journal for People-Centered Development, 14:1,
185-188, DOI: 10.1080/19452829.2013.762183
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Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 2013
Vol. 14, No. 1, 185 –188, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2013.762183
Educating Capabilities
ELAINE UNTERHALTER
Elaine Unterhalter is Professor of Education and International Development
at the Institute of Education, London, UK
‘Our world needs more critical thinking and more respectful argument’,
Martha Nussbaum writes in drawing the lucid arguments made in Creating
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Capabilities to a close (Nussbaum, 2011, p. 187). This worry about the way
in which sound bites, rhetoric or dogma colour so much public discussion
is comprehensively countered in this work. In a relatively short but very inci-
sive analysis, Nussbaum clearly states her position regarding the nature of the
capabilities approach, the distinction between internal and combined capa-
bilities and the centrality of dignity to discussions of equality. While there is
some reprise of ideas from earlier works regarding, for example, the justifica-
tion of a list of central capabilities that constitute a threshold level to secure a
life worthy of human dignity, and how the capabilities approach differs from
utilitarianism, there is also a very clear articulation of ideas that were some-
times slightly implicit, notably with regard to political liberalism. In this
short contribution I want to highlight how the book makes a very full state-
ment regarding Nussbaum’s ideas on education and the capabilities approach.
Her concern with education is threaded through the whole work, as it is
explicitly and implicitly in other books. Education initially appears in Creating
Capabilities in the framing story of Vasanti. Vasanti is ‘a small woman’ in her
early thirties living in Ahmedabad. She is violently abused by her gambling,
alcoholic husband, who had had a vasectomy because of the inducement of
a cash payment. This leaves Vasanti without children to help her and she
returns in shame to her parents’ home. With support from her father and
brothers she is able to earn a living making saris, and with the help of the
Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) she gets a loan to repay her
family, enrols in education programmes, learns to read and write, and
becomes an active campaigner against domestic violence. While Nussbaum
notes that Vasanti’s limited education cuts her off from understanding
history, politics, economics, and reading poetry or novels, SEWA’s use of
dance and music in their education programmes gives her access to much
enjoyment. As she learns to understand her situation, and that of women
like her, she comes to appreciate the significance of aspects of public
policy and the importance of good nutrition. But while her insight into
these issues increases, the local elites benefitting from escalating economic
growth in India do not develop a commensurate understanding of her con-
dition. In this context Nussbaum recalls Hard Times, Dickens’ satire on
# 2013 Human Development and Capability Association
E. Unterhalter
economic growth in Victorian England. In this novel, the young Sissy Jupe,
denied even a name by her teacher, notes with perspicacity that it is not aggre-
gate growth that matters, but how it is distributed. For her teacher and the
society Dickens satirized, that was definitely not the right answer.
In these framing stories, lack of education is part of a gross neglect, the
denial of dignity even to be noticed or named. It is through education that
insight, pleasure, and social change happens. The stories evoke a key theme
for Nussbaum; that education plays a particular role in relation to capabilities.
She writes that all the central capabilities on her list support each other, but
that two—affiliation and practical reason—‘play a distinctive architectonic
role: they organize and pervade the others’ (Nussbaum, 2011, p. 39). These
two are particularly nurtured by forms of education, whether inside or
outside school. Thus education has the potential, it is suggested, to contribute
to the realization of all the capabilities on her list.
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Later in the book she develops this theme, noting that ‘At the heart of the
Capabilities Approach since its inception has been the importance of edu-
cation’ (Nussbaum, 2011, p. 152). She acknowledges the multiple sites of edu-
cation for children and adults: in schools, the family, and non-formal
programmes. She sees education forming people’s existing capacities into
internal capabilities, and borrowing from Wolff and de-Shalit (2007) considers
education a particularly significant ‘fertile functioning’ enabling other
functionings central to dignity, equality and opportunity (Nussbaum, 2011,
pp. 139 –154).
In all of this I share her concern, but it is here that I have a puzzle. The
book is generously dedicated to the members of the Human Development
and Capability Association (HDCA). It contains valuable Appendices listing rel-
evant works by Sen, Nussbaum and a number of writers on the capabilities
approach. However, there is a striking absence of citation or reference to
the work of members of the HDCA who have developed the field of study
regarding education and the capability approach. Over more than 10 years,
scholars widely dispersed across Africa, Asia, Australasia, the Americas, the
Middle East and Europe have produced a considerable volume of work on edu-
cation and capabilities.1 This has been written for academic and policy audi-
ences. Some of it is theoretical, contributing both to trying to understand
the location of education capabilities and also to how the notion of capability
shifts other ideas about rights or justice or aims of education. Some of it is
empirical, identifying what learners or teachers consider valuable capabilities
or functionings. Some of this writing is linked to professional practice and
particular modalities of education associated with curriculum, pedagogy or
programme design. Some of it seeks to expand the outline policy directions
sketched in the human development approach to education considering
what aspects of education provision could be measured to capture some
of the multidimensionality of ideas of well-being. Many studies explicitly
engage with Nussbaum’s own work. This field is large and growing. It may
be that in a short book, chiefly about Nussbaum’s own approach to capabili-
ties, an assessment of key achievements and problematic areas of work on
186
Book Symposium
education and capabilities is too large a task to undertake. That said, given her
acknowledgement of the centrality of education to the capabilities approach,
the lack of any reference to this work seems a regrettable omission.
The gap, I think, points to the need for members of the HDCA education
community to review the range of writings emerging on how to position edu-
cation in relation to capabilities and human development. Some themes in
this literature look at the many facets of social diversity and schooling. Using
methods of empirical inquiry they draw out how differently situated children
and adults around the world express what it is they have reason to value
within and about education. This exploration of themes of possibility stands
in contrast with a complementary body of work on how capabilities in edu-
cation are constrained by conditions in schools and universities, and what strat-
egies attempt to overcome these. Working with this sense of capabilities as
potentialities, a number of studies look at the ways education works as a capa-
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bility multiplier. This links with studies of capabilities and professional practice,
notably teaching in schools and higher education, considering both the capabili-
ties of teachers and how to teach through capabilities. While much has been
learned through engaged empirical study, additional theoretical and conceptual
work has been done on how the idea of capabilities expands and supplements
the notion of rights to education and social justice in education. The connections
between capabilities and primary goods when thinking about education have
been explored in connection with discussions of justice and equality. Another
body of work looks at capabilities and education in relation to policy discussion.
Here the idea of capability has been used to critique an over-economistic notion
of quality in education, the limits of gender parity, and to contribute to ideas of
more multi-dimensional approaches to measuring education and equality. It can
be seen that not only is the idea of capabilities expanding educational inquiry,
education is itself a particular creative space for the capabilities approach.
Currently, looking around the world, there are many reasons to be cheer-
less with regard to narrowing agendas on schooling, limited engagement with
inequalities, and the concentration of what is seen as highly valued knowledge
at particular elite nodes. The capabilities approach provides an enormously
rich framework through which to critique this and other ways in which the
possibilities of education are being traduced. In taking up Nussbaum’s injunc-
tion to use critical thinking and respectful argument, we need to consider
where education is being positioned, by whom and what other kinds of analy-
sis can be made. Creating Capabilities gives us many valuable ideas with
which to undertake this argument, but the place of education in its frame
story is in need of considerable expansion; luckily, we now are starting to
have a depth of knowledge to begin to do this.
Note
1 In 2003 Madoko Saito first set out to consider what she termed ‘the underexplored’ relation-
ship between the capability approach and education (Saito, 2003). Although, Sen, Nussbaum
and Gasper had all written about capabilities and education in the 1990s, Saito began a trend
187
E. Unterhalter
for commentators from within education, to consider the scope of the capability approach
for questions about education as theory, practice, and a field of empirical research. Some sig-
nificant milestones in the development of this literature have been a number of edited
volumes (Walker and Unterhalter, 2007; Otto and Ziegler, 2010; Biggeri et al., 2011; Boni
and Walker, 2013) and some special journal issues, notably Studies in the Philosophy of Edu-
cation (vol. 28, no. 5, 2009), the Journal of Human Development and Capabilities (vol. 13,
no. 3, 2012), and the Cambridge Journal of Education (vol. 42, no. 3, 2012). A number of
monographs have also been produced.
References
Biggeri, M., Ballet, J. and Comim, F. (Eds) (2011) Children and the Capability Approach,
Palgrave, London.
Boni, A. and Walker, M. (2013) Human Development and Capabilities: Re-imagining the
University of the Twenty First Century, Routledge, London.
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Nussbaum, M. C. (2011) Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach, Belknap
Press, Cambridge, MA.
Otto, H. and Ziegler, H. (Eds) (2010) Education, Welfare and the Capabilities Approach.
A Euroepan Perspective, Barbara Budruch Publishers, Opladen.
Saito, M. (2003) ‘Amartya Sen’s capability approach to education: A critical exploration’,
Journal of Philosophy of Education, 37(1), pp. 17–33.
Walker, M. and Unterhalter, E. (Eds) (2007) Sen’s Capability Approach and Social Justice in
Education, Palgrave, London.
Wolff, J. and de-Shalit, A. (2007) Disadvantage, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
188
