Technical and Vocational Education and Training as a Framework for Social Justice
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This includes the capacity to increase one’s knowledge, understanding and appreciation, for example, by progressing to higher levels of education. These contribute to Nussbaum’s central human functional capabilities for senses, imagination, and thought; practical reason; and control over one’s environment. By ‘developing each student as a citizen’, we refer to tertiary education’s role in developing students’ capacity to contribute to their community and to participate in the governance of their society. These contribute to Nussbaum’s central human functional capabilities for affiliation and control over one’s environment. By developing each student as a worker, we refer to tertiary education’s role in developing students’ capacity to be and do in work what they have reason to value (Moodie, Wheelahan, & Lavigne, 2018). This contributes to Nussbaum’s central human functional capabilities for senses, imagination, and thought; affiliation; control over one’s environment; and it provides the resources necessary for life and health. We understand work broadly to be an activity which seeks to sustain an individual or society. This includes paid employment, voluntary work, and ‘self provisioning within the household’ as Pahl (1984) calls it, and excludes recreation and leisure (Voss, 1967). Capabilities for work is distinguished from human capital, which is humans’ augmentation of production for exchange: At the risk of some oversimplification, it can be said that the literature on human capital tends to concentrate on the agency of human beings in augmenting production possibilities. The perspective of human capability focuses, on the other hand, on the ability – the substantive freedom – of people to lead the lives
Alternative: Human Capability
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