VALUES AND EDUCATION

While Sen considers incomplete rankings to be no cause for embarrassment, Bellanca and Biggeri (2013) additionally cast light on human dilemmas unresolved or ignored by Sen’s position. Dilemmas arise when reaching an objective or value necessitates having less of

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another and individuals are unable to order or rank them. For instance, an individual with a capability set including two vectors - one corresponding to functionings when living in Tibet and accepting the Chinese government, and the other concerned with living in Tibet and professing to be a Dalai Lama cultist – must decide between a richer level of functionings and his cultural-national identity. What is important to note is that the individual’s access to functionings is contingent upon the choice he or she makes, that is, he or she first takes a position (either pro-Chinese government or pro-Dalai Lama) before the respective

functionings can follow. Bellanca and Biggeri (2013) thus question Sen’s assumption that the choice of a vector of functionings does not modify other vectors in a capability set, and that any element in each vector is either independent or interdependent but not lexicographically superior to any other. They refute both assumptions as the choice of functionings generally alters capability sets and as situations involving dilemmas show, many functionings of a vector depend on the choice of that unique functioning implicated in the dilemma.

The argument relating choice of functionings and valuations of other elements in a capability set is a powerful one. In fact, Vaughan and Walker (2012) explore precisely one such

dilemma in education, namely, the possibility of employing capabilities to evaluate education policy when education itself determines and alters individual’s capability sets through

valuation in the first place. The issue is that education is inherently value-laden and value- forming; if it were only the process of transmission of values, it would have been possible to give exactly identical values and identical capability sets to individuals through education. However, the fact that education is inescapably normative signals how it is also

transformative, directly influencing and determining individuals’ behaviours and actions. In other words, education not only alters individuals’ ‘conversion factors’ in translating goods and services into capabilities, it also influences their agency goals. This raises several questions regarding how the issue of valuation intercepts the link between education and capability expansion. When making quality of life comparisons, is it more fruitful to consi der agency goal freedoms rather than agency freedoms? 34 _{Is it possible or even desirable to}

34 _{Agency goal freedom refers to an individual’s freedom to form agency goals, “a kind of meta-freedom not captured by the}

concept of agency freedom” or freedom to achieve goals itself (Burchardt, 2009, p.8). The link between education and values, therefore, is not only one whereby education transmits values and transforms them into individual behaviours and actions by influencing agency freedoms, but also one whereby the transformative capacity of education shapes individuals’ agency goal freedoms or beliefs regarding what is valuable. For example, an educational system or process may implicitly or explicitly embody and transmit values like gender injustice. Where such transmission influences individuals’ behaviours and actions – for example, by restricting female students in accessing play facilities like playgrounds and swings vis-à-vis their male counterparts at school – the transformative capacity of education in shaping agency freedoms is brought to light. However, to say that education may also affect agency goal freedoms is to say that, through such learning experiences, the female students in class also start considering submissiveness and passivity vis-à-vis their male counterparts intrinsically

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achieve a value-free education? What types of educational influences or values are compatible with expansion of real freedoms? Vaughan and Walker (2012) argue they are those that enable individuals to learn, realize and clarify what is valuable to them, or, in other words, form their own significant values. Providing evidence from South African

universities, they demonstrate how dialogue, critical knowledge and experiential learning help students internalize pro-poor values alongside developing their capability to work towards that value. This link between education, values and capabilities is also relevant to the research question at hand: in obtaining participants’ valuations in education, it is important to bear in mind the people and processes that may influence individual responses. For instance, children’s valuations are not entirely separable from those of their parents, nor can they be viewed outside contextual factors in communities and schools, such as collective spaces for discussion, teaching, curriculum etc. At the same time, the study has partly sought to explore precisely the same link, that is, whether certain kinds of schooling systems correlate with certain types of valuations in education, and their similarities and dissimilarities (as discussed in Chapters 4 and 5).

Values are central to individuals’ capability sets as they determine the functionings important to them. However, the above discussion urges that attention be given to the processes

involved in value information, questioning how individuals come to value certain doings and beings as their reasons to value can be severely constrained by circumstances (Burchardt, 2009). This points to a third difficulty in employing the CA resulting from individuals’

adaptation or internalization of certain values, making them endure disadvantage and

influencing their preferences. Adaptive preferences are important in their own right: even preferences that have adapted deserve careful scrutiny owing to their role in political and social assessments (Unterhalter, 2012). They can reflect the entire upbringing of individuals in society (Nussbaum, 2011), allowing us to re-consider individuals’ preferences as deeper ‘structural inequalities’ rather than ‘false perceptions’ (Agarwal, 2008). A growing body of literature today stresses the relational and contextual aspects of adaptation with respect to children’s education and schooling experiences. Unterhalter’s (2012) study, for instance, is an illustration of how adaptation and lived experiences of absolute and relative poverty help explain why some children are better able to articulate constraints on capabilities in

educational attainment and ways to overcome them. The challenge, then, lies in disentangling

valuable and desirable. In other words, education in this way not only transmits the value of gender injustice to female students, it also alters their agency freedoms and agency goal freedoms.

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adaptation – in analysing and understanding ‘the subjective, cognitive and reflective position of children in view of the actual constraints and opportunities of their domestic, cultural, social, economic and political environments’ (Biggeri and Libanora, 2011). To the extent that information collected through quantitative research instruments employed in the present study (and explained below) has explored these dimensions in children’s living environments, there is scope to investigate the role of adaptation in influencing their perceptions about valued educational capabilities (Clark and Qizilbash, 2008).

While such challenges cast doubt over the extent to which gaps in theoretical and practical applications of the CA may be bridged (particularly given its emphasis on non-utility information in evaluating well-being and the prevailing dearth of appropriate capability indicators), empirical applications of the approach demonstrate how capabilities can, counter to prevailing wisdom, be measured, as well as clarify theoretical ambiguities in the approach and make its concepts operational (Anand and Van Hees, 2006). Anand, Krishnakumar and Tran (2011) argue that people’s valued freedoms can be identified employing a mixture of theory, argument and evidence, and classify three categories of researchers addressing operationalization-al concerns and lack of data in the approach: i) those pointing out the presence of a number of direct capability indicators in prevailing secondary data; ii) those developing a variety of latent variable structural models to demonstrate how econometric techniques can be used to make inferences about capabilities when direct indicators are not available; and iii) those demonstrating the possibility of developing capability indicators for a general population across a range of dimensions impacting quality of life. Anand et al.

(2009), for instance, have employed Nussbaum’s account of capabilities to develop appropriate capability indicators and explore the extent to which they are covariates of people’s satisfaction/happiness. Similarly, Clark (2003) has illustrated how surveys conducted in South Africa provided information about abstract concepts like human well - being and some of the ‘good things’ (or capability dimensions) in people’s lives. However, such empirical evidence begs the question: Exactly how can capabilities be measured? That there is no definite step-by-step process or mechanism to conduct empirical applications of the CA is attributed not only to the nature of the approach itself, but also to the fact that it is an approach and not a method. Nonetheless, the following section demonstrates how

separating and paying careful attention to conceptual and practical components in the

measurement problem can lead to an appropriate methodology for capability-related research investigations.

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