Education for primary goods or for capabilities?

Abstract

The contention of this chapter is that both Rawls's social primary goods theory and Sen and Nussbaum's capabilities approach offer some resources to guide our thinking. One natural move is to say that education is a social primary good in Rawls's sense. Amartya Sen develops the capabilities approach in response to various problems, none of which have directly to do with education, in the social primary goods approach. The primary goods approach, on its face, is ill- suited to dealing with involuntary differences in individuals' abilities to make use of a fixed amount of resources. The main argument made in the chapter is that neither the primary goods approach nor the capabilities approach, in its current state, is adequate to the task of guiding policymakers in deciding what the content and distribution of educational opportunities should be.