ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a broad introduction to the capabilities approach, and then move on to focus on some of the core concepts on which the approach is built. The capabilities approach extends the human capital conception of education to include both instrumental and intrinsic values of education and the role that education plays in the expansion of individual freedoms, as well as influencing social change. The focus of the capabilities approach on the actual lives of people, means that this approach is directly concerned with practical, everyday forms of inequality and injustice. The capabilities approach, which is a normative framework that takes notions of equality, human dignity and social justice as a starting assumption, would explain this apparent contradiction in a different way. The notion of adaptive preferences as used within the capabilities approach refers to learning to desire what one is being socially constructed to want, rather than what one has reason to value.
