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Chapter 2 Theories of Development.html
Introduction

In 2007, the former UK prime minister Gordon Brown made a
speech at the University of Greenwich on the importance of
education:
And I believe that … we must confront head on three assertions
that I believe have held our country back for too long. The first
is an assumption that there is only limited room at the top, that
there is no point in educating everyone as far as their talents
will take them because the economy simply needs only a few
who are trained for the top. Now I think the fast changing
global economy has decisively defeated that argument. Even if
in the past there might have been national limited room at
the top, now there is clearly global room at the top. Indeed there
are millions more skilled jobs and opportunities in our country
and round the world for people with skills and qualifications.
What we can observe here is an underpinning rationale for
education: namely, that it provides individuals with the skills
they need to succeed in work and by extension that economic
growth is brought about by the investments that countries and
individuals make in their skills. This view corresponds to that
of human capital theory, one of the key frameworks that have
driven international education practice over the past fifty years.
That Gordon Brown did not cite human capital theory – or
indeed whether he is even aware of it – is beside the point. This
and many other theories orient practice and policy, whether or
not they are invoked explicitly or used consciously.
This chapter outlines some of the major theories of international
development that have influenced the work of supranational
agencies, national governments and local actors since the end of
the Second World War. It is not intended as a comprehensive
overview of development theory but instead a treatment that
focuses on the principal types of theory (by political and
epistemological orientation) and those that have had most
relevance for the field of education. In each case, the major
characteristics of the theory are outlined, as well as some of its
well-known proponents and its implications for education.
(Some of the implications of these theories for research

specifically are also drawn out in Chapter 5.)
Yet two questions need to be addressed before turning to the
specific theories: first, what exactly is ‘theory’, and second,
why – given the apparently practical nature of the task of
development – should we be interested in theory at all? In
relation to the first of these questions, we might distinguish
between what might be called ‘big T’ theory and ‘little T’
theory. There are theories that present themselves as ‘theory X’,
have a coherent body of literature – usually with theoretical
components and empirical applications – have researchers who
utilize them explicitly and are publicly recognizable. Examples
of these forms of theories are the theory of relativity, game
theory or in relation to international development, dependency
theory. Yet there is another use of the term ‘theory’ that is more
elusive and at the same time more present in our everyday lives.
In this sense, theory is every abstraction from the concrete. Use
of language to describe the world around us involves abstraction
and representation, in particular in grouping and categorizing
phenomena (e.g. use of the term ‘animal’ to denote a wide range
of beings with some common characteristics). As an extension,
we use theory to understand the causes of the phenomena we
perceive (its explanatory function) and thereby to predict how
phenomena will change or occur in the future (its predictive
function). Furthermore, theory has a normative function in
asserting how things should be in the world, particularly as
regards human behaviour and social organization. All
statements about the world, in this sense, are theory, as they are
attempting to abstract from the actual instances to which they
are referring.
The distinction between explanatory and normative aspects of
theory is important in relation to international development. A
theory of the explanatory type is human capital theory (HCT),
which attempts to explain why some economies grow more
rapidly than others and from which we can adopt strategies for
ensuring growth in the future. Normative theories on the other
hand make claims about what is of value in the world. The

capability approach, for example, asserts that we should
evaluate the desirability of social arrangements not on the basis
of maximization of GDP alone but on the full range of freedoms
that are accorded to people. Martinussen (1997), in a similar
vein, distinguishes between three types of theorizing around
development: ‘concept’ (the overarching vision of
development), ‘theory’ (understanding the process of change
and the conditions underpinning it) and ‘strategy’ (actions and
interventions adopted to achieve the aims). Of course, we
cannot separate completely the explanatory and normative
dimensions – normally, explanatory theories are underpinned by
normative assumptions (so HCT rests on the value of wealth
accumulation, both individually and nationally) and normative
theories may also have explanations of the world built into them
(Marx’s advocacy for socialism is partly normative, but is also
based on a reading of the inherent contradictions of capitalism
in practice).
Theory – particularly of the ‘big T’ variety – is often perceived
to be intimidating (and it is fair to say that some theorists do
little to make their work more accessible). Theoretical thought
is portrayed as hard to understand, and moreover to be divorced
from reality, either because it is irrelevant in terms of the
characteristics of the current situation or too idealistic in terms
of the practically feasible. According to this perspective, on the
one side we have ‘theory’ – lofty, dry, utopian and irrelevant –
and on the other side we have ‘practice’ – everyday, engaging,
realistic and useful. However, it is important that we do not
view theory in this way. In the first place, theory is not
something we can choose to use or not. Understood as the
fundamental abstract principles underlying specific instances,
theory is within every practice, whether evident and known
or not. When a government designs a set of policies for the
education system – involving funding priorities, a framework of
aims, curricular content and so forth – it is drawing on a range
of principles relating to social justice, the good life and the
nature of knowledge, whether or not these are made explicit.

Likewise, every time teachers stand up in class, their practice of
teaching is similarly informed by theories of an
epistemological, political and moral nature.
We can identify three main reasons, therefore, for engaging
with theory in the field of education and international
development. First, as readers and users of research, it is
important that we understand the theories that are being utilized
by the authors. Second, as researchers, we will utilize a range of
theories in collecting, analysing and interpreting data – and
indeed in deciding what is and is not worth researching. Last,
drawing on the idea above that theory is present in all practice,
awareness of theory is essential for understanding the
underpinnings of policies and practices with which we come
into contact, allowing us more effectively to engage, critique
and recast them.
The following sections will outline five paradigms of
development theory: liberal capitalist, Marxist, liberal
egalitarian, postcolonial and radical humanist. In each of these,
different specific theories as well as a range of theorists are
grouped. As stated above, this grouping is not intended as an
exhaustive categorization of development theories but a
generative selection to highlight the major approaches. Some of
the key components of these theories are outlined in Table 2.1.
Table 2.1 Paradigms of development theory
The liberal capitalist paradigm
A range of theories emerged after the end of the Second World
War associated with promoting and sustaining economic growth
and focusing on how countries could most effectively rebuild
and restructure their economies. These theories have as their
primary assumption that capitalism is the ideal or perhaps the
only form of economic organization. They are for the most part
universalist and assume that all countries’ economies can and
should be organized along similar lines.
‘Development economics’ emerged in the post-war period as a
branch of the discipline addressing the specific conditions of

the ‘Third World’. However, by the late 1950s, theorists began
to recognize the importance of social and cultural factors in
facilitating or hindering economic growth (Desai 2012), leading
to the emergence of modernization theory. In essence, this
theory asserts that the key to economic growth is the
transformation of the ‘traditional’ into the ‘modern’. The US
economist Walt Rostow (1960) put forward a model of
economic development that envisaged countries moving through
five phases:
(1) The traditional society;
(2) The establishment of the pre-conditions for take-off;
(3) The take off stage (The Big Push – marked by
(i) an increase in investment rate
(ii) development of growth sectors of aggregate demand and
(iii) establishment of social, political and institutional
frameworks);
(4) The drive to maturity;
(5) The époque of high mass consumption (self-sustaining).
Rostow (1960, p. 19) stated:
Above all, the concept must be spread that man need not regard
his physical environment as virtually a factor given by nature
and providence, but as an ordered world which, if rationally
understood, can be manipulated in ways which yield productive
change. …
The process of modernization is seen to relate to both the
institutions of society (legal systems, the market, political
organization) and individuals’ attitudes (becoming ambitious
and entrepreneurial rather than superstitious and averse to
change). Modernization theory, therefore, had a strong
disciplinary presence from outside economics, including
sociology (e.g. Inkeles and Smith 1975) and psychology (e.g.
McClelland 1961). McClelland’s psychological variant focused
on the achievement motive, assessing the varying extents to
which peoples around the world were motivated to succeed and
thereby allow their nations to develop.
The connections to education are plain. Formal education

systems are themselves an instance of a modern institution but
also serve the function of ‘modernizing’ through inculcating a
set of norms and attitudes, and forming skills for diverse
functions in society. Just as the establishment of mass schooling
systems had underpinned the formation of the modern state in
Western Europe and North America (Green 2013), so they
would need to in the newly independent countries of Asia and
Africa. As argued by Unterhalter (2008), modernization theory
linked in closely with the nation-building agendas of many
newly independent countries, served by the development of
mass education for national citizenship through a common
language.
Human capital theory (which will be discussed in further detail
in Chapters 7 and 14) can be located within this paradigm –
although the focus is more on skills and other attributes for
economic productivity rather than the broader norms or
attitudes underpinning the modern state. Economists in the
United States from the 1960s (e.g. Gary Becker [1964],
Theodore Schultz [1961]) drew on ideas in the work of the
eighteenth-century Scottish economist Adam Smith to assert the
fundamental role of education in economic growth. Drawing on
empirical data, they showed that differences in economic
growth between countries could be explained by the level of
education of the population (e.g. Psacharopolous 1994). On an
individual level, investment in one’s own education (as well as
associated factors such as health) would enhance one’s
productivity and thereby one’s earnings, and on a collective
level the increase in human capital stock would drive economic
growth. Despite a range of concerns and challenges to the
theory within the field of economics (e.g. screening hypothesis),
human capital theory has prospered and is undoubtedly the key
driving force for national investment in education and the
advocacy of supranational agencies in low- and middle-income
countries to this day.
Liberal capitalist approaches have had a significant revival in
recent years through the ascendancy of free-market ideas

associated with neo-liberalism. Here, assertions of the ends of
development as economic growth have been accompanied by
claims that the means are through market-based competition,
minimal state intervention and individual entrepreneurship and
initiative. Neo-liberalism has fuelled, and in turn been given
impetus by, the processes of globalization, and the
intensification of transnational economic activity. Within
education, it has expressed itself through the privatization of
educational systems: first, the creation of quasi-markets and
introduction of cost-sharing within public systems, and second,
the growth of private providers, even serving low-income
communities at the primary level in countries such as India,
Nigeria and Ghana (Tooley 2009). In this model, education not
only serves to form productive workers but is also a source of
profit making itself.
The liberal capitalist development model is subject to a range of
critiques. First, it assumes that economic growth is the only or
the primary feature of development. While the constituent
theories attend to a range of aspects of society – such as
education and political institutions – these are portrayed as
instrumental in enhancing economic growth rather than being
valuable in themselves. Is a materially poor, but safe,
unpolluted, democratic, and culturally and spiritually rich
society necessarily worse off? Second, the liberal capitalist
development model is relatively unconcerned with inequality.
Human capital theory’s roots in utilitarianism do ensure an
element of egalitarianism, underpinned as it is by the idea is
that all people’s human capital can and should be invested in.
However, the modernization paradigm as a whole accepts
significant resulting inequalities in status, function and wealth
in society and sees little reason to address them for their own
sake. Finally, liberal capitalism assumes a single model for
development and one primarily based on the ‘Western’ model:
Rostow’s five stages – derived initially from Britain’s trajectory
of industrialization – are seen to apply to all countries.
‘Modern’, in this sense, is just code for becoming more like the

capitalist countries of Western Europe and North America (and
indeed the theory was utilized in the Cold War – see, for
example, Rostow’s personal involvement in Vietnam as adviser
to Lyndon Johnson and advocate for the escalation of the
conflict [Desai 2012]). There is no sense in this theory that
there might be a range of ‘moderns’ or indeed that it might
simply be better to be ‘traditional’.
All of the subsequent theories to be assessed in this chapter can
be understood as responses to one or other of these problematic
aspects of the liberal capitalist paradigm. The next focuses on
the aspect of economic inequalities, asserting that the purported
helpfulness of these theories in fuelling growth in the poorest
countries is in fact a mask for ensuring the latter’s continuing
domination by the rich world.
The Marxist paradigm
There is a body of development theory emerging primarily in
the 1960s and 1970s that can be broadly described as Marxist in
that it provides a critical counterpoint to the approaches based
on accumulation of capital outlined earlier. According to these
views, ‘the persistence of poverty was not an oversight, but a
key dimension of capitalism, which required a reserve army of
labour, who were poorly educated and impoverished’
(Unterhalter 2008). The most prominent of these is dependency
theory. The basic principle of dependency is well expressed by
this passage from Theotonio dos Santos (1970, p. 1):
By dependence we mean a situation in which the economy of
certain countries is conditioned by the development and
expansion of another economy to which the former is subjected
… . This theoretical step transcends the theory of development
which seeks to explain the situation of the underdeveloped
countries as a product of their slowness or failure to adopt the
patterns of efficiency characteristic of developed countries (or
to ‘modernize’ or ‘develop’ themselves).
From this perspective, modernization is a deficit theory, placing
the blame for lack of development with the poor countries
themselves; for dependency theory on the other hand, poverty is

caused by the wealthy countries and the relations of dependency
they have created. The world then consists of ‘core’ and
‘periphery’ countries, the latter engaged primarily in agriculture
and mineral extraction while the former reaps the benefits
through controlling flows of capital and high value industrial
production. Cores and peripheries are also seen to exist within
countries.
The theory emerged first from the work of Raúl Prebisch and
Hans Singer, who in 1950 independently observed that the terms
of trade for exporters of primary goods tended to deteriorate
over time in relation to exporters of manufactured goods.
Dependency theory is, therefore, initially an explanatory, rather
than a normative one, in the sense that it is based on the
empirical claim that a country’s dependency has an adverse
effect on its economic prospects. It advocated import-
substitution and ultimately ‘delinking’ from the international
system as the best solution for the so-called Third World
countries. Nevertheless, there is clearly a normative element,
opposing the existence of an unequal world order and
questioning the dominance of the Western powers over the rest
of the globe.
Like Prebisch and dos Santos, many of the initial theorists of
dependency theory were from Latin America – for example, the
sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who went on to be
Brazilian president – with the US-based thinkers Andre Gunder
Frank and Paul Baran (exiles from Nazi Germany) also
influential. Immanuel Wallerstein’s ‘world systems theory’ also
drew heavily on dependency theory in asserting the continuing
dominance of capitalist centres through drawing peripheries and
semi-peripheries into an interdependent global economic
system. These thinkers also drew on earlier Marxist analyses
such as that of Rosa Luxemburg, in which imperialism is
attributed to the need for capital to go beyond national borders
and incorporate and thereby exploit non-capitalist regions of the
world.
Dependency theory relates first and foremost to the economic

system – and as such it has relevance for education as regards
the funds that are available for educational provision. However,
there have been more direct applications of the theory to
education. From the 1970s onwards, researchers and theorists
such as Ali Mazrui (1975), Philip Altbach (1977), Gail Kelly
(1982) and Martin Carnoy (1974) analysed the ways in which
education systems in the South after independence continued to
be dependent on the systems of the former colonial powers.
They retained colonial languages within education, maintained
similar curricula (focusing on Western subject matter) and
relied on Western publishing houses. The implication was, as in
the economy as a whole, that countries should delink and pursue
their own educational course. A significant reform along these
lines was carried out in Tanzania, through Julius Nyerere’s
vision of Education for Self-Reliance (1967). These changes to
the education system oriented the curriculum and institutional
forms away from the colonial model and tied them more closely
to the realities of rural life and cooperativism, although like
Nyerere’s broader designs for African socialism, were unable to
fully take root.
Ideas of dependency also resonate with theorists of social
reproduction through education such as Bowles and Gintis
(1976), Bourdieu and Passeron (1977) and Willis (1978), who
showed that instead of providing an opportunity for social
mobility, education systems merely reproduced existing social
class inequalities. Educational dependency had its critics,
however, with McLean (1983) and Noah and Eckstein (1988),
for example, questioning the validity of the theory’s transfer
from economics to education and its oversimplification of
relations between centre and periphery.
Dependency theory more broadly was rejected by supporters of
capitalism-driven development as part of the broader
ideological and political hostilities of the Cold War. This strong
divide – and the marked lack of dialogue between the two sides
in the 1980s – has been described as an impasse in development
theory: the sense of a dead end, with neither global capitalism

nor state socialism providing a viable or effective solution for
the world’s poor. As the 1990s unfolded, however, there
emerged from the impasse a range of other theories and
approaches, as will be explored in the following sections.
Postcolonialism
The roots of postcolonial theory – in an epistemological sense –
are in the post-structuralist movement associated with French
philosophers, historians and linguists in the mid-twentieth
century. Post-structuralism made a radical turn in questioning
the very foundations of Western thought – whether Marxist or
capitalist. The European Age of Enlightenment had been
founded on the use of reason in the pursuit of truth and the
possibility of human progress through knowledge. Post-
structuralism asserted that there was no universal or objective
basis for these claims to the true, the right or the good. Michel
Foucault (1965), through a detailed historical analysis, aimed to
show how dominant knowledge paradigms, such as the logic of
rationality, had emerged over the ages through a confluence of
contingencies. Dominant groups ensured that their version of
reality was maintained in the ascendancy, and
this discourseworked through others in society, marking the
bounds of what was possible and impossible to think or know.
Feminist thought has also been influential in this regard, in
uncovering and critiquing the fundamental patriarchal
assumptions of Enlightenment thought that could be used to
portray women as lacking rationality and therefore incapable of
political or cultural participation, thus legitimating oppressive
structuring of societies.
In a postcolonial paradigm, these ideas were applied to the
relationship between colonizer and colonized. It was not just
that physical violence had been inflicted on colonized peoples
nor that their natural wealth had been extracted and their
economies locked into a relationship of dependency: they had
begun to see themselves through the eyes of the colonizer and
speak with the colonizer’s voice. The imposed language and
frames of thought had cast them in the role of ‘other’ –

deficient and degenerate in relation to the norm. Thinkers such
as Franz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), Edward
Said in Orientalism (1980), Gayatri Spivak (1988, 1999),
Archille Mbembe (2001), Anita Loomba (2005) and a number of
others developed variations on this perspective.
As Spivak (1988, pp. 280–281) states:
The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the
remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to
constitute the colonial subject as Other … . It is well known
that Foucault locates epistemic violence … in the redefinition of
sanity at the end of the European eighteenth century. But what
if that particular redefinition was only a part of the narrative of
history in Europe as well as in the colonies? What if the two
projects of epistemic overhaul worked as dislocated and
unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine?
The postcolonial paradigm also influenced the emergence
of post-development thinkers (such as Arturo Escobar and Majid
Rahnema), applying this mode of critique to conventional
approaches to development (Escobar 1995, Rahnema and
Bawtree 1997). Through this perspective, poverty and the need
for external aid are constructions with the development industry
simply remoulding the Third World in a bedraggled image of
the West. These concerns have resonated both with indigenous
movements campaigning against cultural onslaught and with
environmentalists opposing the destructive effects of Western
models of wealth accumulation. Revolutionary movements such
as the Zapatistas in Mexico have drawn on these critiques, as
well as on anarchist ideas about the creation of utopias in the
here and now, in the development of autonomous communities.
Educational applications of postcolonialism and post-
development are to a large extent ones of critique: of revealing
the hidden assumptions and veiled disparagement of indigenous
cultures (e.g. Adjei 2007). In terms of alternative constructions,
the focus has either been on recuperation of indigenous
knowledge forms or on a fusion of indigenous and Western
perspectives. Decolonizing education, in Andreotti’s (2011)

terms, is a process of ‘learning to read the world through other
eyes’, of acknowledging the multiple perspectives on reality and
refraining from imposing a single reading. An example in
practice of the type of autonomous development advocated by
the post-development theorists can be seen in the UNITIERRA
initiative in southern Mexico (see Pathways to practice 2).
The main critique of post-structuralism and postcolonialism is
its lack of a clear path of action in response to the situation of
domination (Unterhalter 2007a). Proponents of the approach
advocate a process of emancipation, through deconstruction and
critique, and increasing awareness and therefore liberation from
the enslaving thought forms. However, for many this response is
insufficiently concrete and practicable given the pressing
challenges and sufferings.
Pathways to practice 2
Universidad de la Tierra (UNITIERRA)
The University of the Land, or in its Spanish acronym
UNITIERRA, is a rare example of a manifestation in practice of
the post-development paradigm. Created in the Mexican state of
Oaxaca in 2001 (with a sister ‘branch’ in Chiapas), it aims to
challenge fundamental conceptions of the educational
institution. Drawing on the ideas of ‘deschooling’ of Ivan Illich,
as well as contemporary post-development thinker Gustavo
Esteva, it provides an opportunity for higher study for those
who have become disillusioned with or dropped out of the
mainstream education system. In the words of Esteva, the
university has ‘no teachers, no classrooms, no curriculum and
no campus’*. Students come to the university with their own
research and action projects, whether in philosophy, urban
agriculture or video production, and develop these over a period
of years through working with facilitators and developing
initiatives in the community. Another important feature is that
the university provides no formal qualifications. The key
challenge of UNITIERRA remains that of whether young people
will be willing to give up the exchange value of a regular
degree for a more meaningful learning experience.

*http://www.gustavoesteva.com/english_site/back_from_the_fut
ure.htm
Liberal egalitarianism
The liberal egalitarian theories do not take as a starting point
the eradication of capitalist modes of production and the free
market, although they do require a significant tempering of their
workings in practice in accordance with social justice. In
opposition to some versions of socialism, they also assert the
primacy of individual liberty – guarding against the
subordination of the individual to the collective; while in
contrast to post-structuralist thought, they retain faith in the
possibility of a universal morality and that concrete steps
towards improvements in practice can be made.
One version of this approach – that of human rights – has a long
lineage but came to the fore in the period following the Second
World War and the formation of the UN. The proclamation of
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the range of
subsequent legally binding covenants and conventions, have
created a framework intended to guarantee a dignified life for
all human beings independently of where they may be living.
Rights-based approaches, which became influential in
development work from the 1990s, recast the inhabitants of
impoverished parts of the globe as rights-holders entitled to
justice rather than beneficiaries of the charity of the privileged.
A variant – the basic needs approach (e.g. Stewart 1985) – had
also been influential from the 1970s, asserting the primacy of
the task of ensuring basic minima for all of the world’s
population, although lacking a clear relationship between
rights-holder (individual and community) and duty-bearer
(primarily the nation state) of rights-based approaches.
Unterhalter (2008) locates the later EFA movement’s approach
to educational entitlements and obligations within the basic
needs paradigm.
A more recent variant is the human development approach,
drawing primarily on the work on capabilities by Amartya Sen
(1992, 1999) and developed by others such as Martha Nussbaum

(2000) and Mahbub Ul Haq (1995). These approaches hold that
development should be understood as the freedom for all people
to do and be what they have reason to value (see discussion
in Chapter 12). As such, it represents a departure from reductive
emphases on economic growth and acknowledges the
heterogeneity of human beings in terms of their life goals. It
also represents a more general movement towards people-
centred conceptions of development, with participation of local
communities seen as having intrinsic and instrumental value –
or even to be constitutive of development (McCowan and
Unterhalter 2013). Martha Nussbaum’s proposal for a list of
central capabilities is presented in Concepts 1. The approach
has also been influential in the development of the Human
Development Index (HDI), which gauges education and life
expectancy in addition to per capita GNI.
A primary application of these approaches to education is that
education systems must distribute their benefits in an
egalitarian manner: whether upholding for all the right or the
capability to education. Yet there is also a reorientation of the
aims of the educational process: in this way, education
underpins the full set of human rights, empowering individuals
to understand, exercise and defend their rights, or being a
multiplier of capabilities. Central to this function is the task of
fostering individual autonomy, the ability to choose between
different life courses and enhance agency. Recent years have
seen a flowering of literature on both rights-based approaches to
education (e.g. Tomaševski 2001, 2003, UNICEF/UNESCO
2007, McCowan 2013) as well as capabilities in education (e.g.
Unterhalter 2003, Robeyns 2006, Walker and Unterhalter 2007).
Practical manifestations of rights-based approaches have also
been seen in UNICEF’s rights respecting and child friendly
schools, for example, which aim to uphold the broad range of
children’s rights within institutions (including gender equality,
health, nutrition and safety) as well as enhance knowledge of
the Convention on the Rights of the Child and children’s
participation in the management of the school.

Liberal egalitarian approaches are not immune to critique from
either the left or the right of the political spectrum. For
capitalist libertarians, their efforts at redistribution place
intolerable restraints on the individual freedom that is supposed
to be at the heart of liberalism. For Marxists, the entitlements
guaranteed to marginalized populations are but a palliative, to
provide some amelioration of conditions but ultimately
perpetuating the unjust economic system. For post-
structuralists, while these egalitarian approaches are less crude
than the bulldozer narratives of modernization and Marxism,
they are still riven with unfounded, culturally specific and
ultimately dangerous assumptions of an epistemological and
ontological nature.
Concepts 1
Nussbaum’s List of Capabilities
Martha Nussbaum has put forward a list of 10 central human
functionings, proposed as basic entitlements for all human
beings around the world and a basis for national constitutions:
(1) Life
(2) Bodily health
(3) Bodily integrity
(4) Senses, imagination and thought
(5) Emotions
(6) Practical reason
(7) Affiliation
(8) Other species
(9) Play
(10) Political and material control over one’s environment
While the list has had widespread recognition, there are also
detractors, due to its universal pretensions. Amartya Sen
himself has resisted the creation of a list of capabilities, on
account of the need for local determination of needs and goals.
Source: Nussbaum (2000)
Radical humanism
The final section relates not to a coherent body of theory as
such but to the work of certain theorists and practitioners who

share a set of principles that distinguish them from the above
theories – and importantly for this book, place a particular
emphasis on the role of education in development. In these
approaches, education is not a fruit of development or even a
driver of development but is development itself. The process of
learning, understood as the fundamental experience of
emancipation, and the necessary engagement in it of all
members of society, is both the means and the end of
development.
The best-known of these thinkers is the Brazilian Paulo Freire
(also discussed in Chapter 15), who formulated his ideas most
famously in the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972). In
contrast to dominant state socialist advocates, he asserted that
revolution needed to start not with the seizing of state power
but with the transformation of the self and the emergence of
critical consciousness. The collective development of
understanding in the oppressed, and the consequent liberation of
the oppressors, would lead organically and sustainably to the
transformation of societal structures. These ideas, therefore,
share some principles with dependency theory and
postcolonialism but went beyond critique of the relics of
colonial education systems to put forward a practical solution in
the form of a set of pedagogical principles. Central to this
vision is dialogue – understood not just as conversation, but as
a radical revisioning of the pedagogical relationship through
which teachers approach learners not as empty vessels to be
filled with knowledge (the so-called banking education), but
engage with them in a shared and horizontal process of critical
reflection and learning (Freire 1972).
Freire’s ideas were taken up by a range of other thinkers, such
as Augusto Boal (2000) in relation to theatre. Parallels can also
be seen in the thought of Mahatma Gandhi (Kumar 1994) and
Julius Nyerere (1967) (as well as many others such as Steve
Biko and Rabindranath Tagore) who in their distinct contexts
advocated for an emancipatory education as a conduit for and
actualization of social transformation. The participatory nature

of Freire’s political ideas found echoes in the participatory turn
in development as a whole (e.g. Chambers 1997, Hickey and
Mohan 2005), leading to fusions such as Participatory Learning
and Action. ActionAid also adopted Freire’s ideas in their
REFLECT adult learning programme (as described in Chapter
15). However, radical humanist approaches are distinct from
mainstream learner-centred reforms in education in their
explicit commitment to political emancipation and social
transformation rather than just effective learning.
Freire laid himself open to forceful critiques from feminist
thinkers, on account of his use of language and inattentiveness
to difference and to overlapping forms of oppression (e.g.
Weiler 1996). Some (e.g. hooks 1996), while acknowledging
deficiencies of his thought, have rekindled the principles in a
way that is more attuned to gender and racial injustices – and
these ideas have spawned a larger movement on the academic
left under the label of ‘critical pedagogy’ (e.g. Giroux and
McLaren 1986, Shor 1992). Ultimately, the greatest barrier of
these approaches is the quietness of their voice in relation to the
blare of global capitalism and even mainstream development. In
the contemporary context, the idealism underpinning radical
humanist thought is very often dismissed as impractical and
excessively optimistic about human nature.

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