From powerful knowledge to capabilities: social realism, social justice, and the Capabilities Approach

Abstract

This article argues that, as applied to education, the Capabilities Approach pioneered by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum shares a range of philosophical commitments with the work of social realist scholars on the concept of ‘powerful knowledge’. I first trace the history of the concept of powerful knowledge and present critiques put forward by social justice scholars. I then outline the Capabilities Approach, arguing it provides a response to some of these concerns. From here I develop the connection between the two educational paradigms focusing on four areas of affinity. The first is the conceptual similarity between the ‘power’ of powerful knowledge and Nussbaum’s account of a capability. The second is their concern with the reduction of education to technical-instrumentalism, human capital, and other economically driven imperatives. The third is a shared focus on the link between knowledge, human agency, and freedom. The fourth, is a mutual rejection of relativism and embrace of a nuanced universalism. Ultimately, by drawing together these two conceptually rich approaches to the aims and purposes of education, I hope to open a space for theorizing about both capabilities and powerful knowledge that can resolve some of the problems in both. For powerful knowledge, the Capabilities Approach allows a more concrete explication of why access to disciplinary bodies of knowledge is of value to both individuals and society. On the side of the Capabilities Approach, engaging with the concept of powerful knowledge can help give a rationale for how educational knowledge fosters certain centrally important capabilities.

Introduction

The pages of this journal have engaged with both the Capabilities Approach as it applies to education (Saito 2003; Hinchliffe 2007; Gracia-Calandín and Tamarit-López 2021) and the notion of ‘powerful knowledge’ most associated with Michael Young (Hardman 2019). Both theories have a large and growing body of academic literature behind them and, particularly in the case of powerful knowledge, an increasing influence on education policy. This article seeks to draw the two approaches together by exploring some of their philosophical commitments. In doing so, I spend most of my time looking at the work of Michael Young and Martha Nussbaum. I argue that Nussbaum’s version of the Capabilities Approach and the sociology of knowledge underpinning the concept of powerful knowledge, share deep intellectual affinities. These affinities solve problems I identify in each.

The social realist project of providing a theoretical account of ‘powerful knowledge’ entails the rejection of variants of epistemological relativism as well as the technocratic, skills-based understanding of education associated with human capital approaches (Muller and Young 2019). In its place, social realists suggest the knowledge produced in academic disciplines is both social and objective; neither the wraithlike, disembodied knowledge of positivism, nor the ‘voice discourse’ that reduces all knowledge claims to individual knowers and/or cultural groups. The concept of powerful knowledge was born out of this intellectual movement and is now prevalent in academia, policy, and institutions bound up with the so-called ‘knowledge-turn’ in education (Muller 2023).

However, despite an unashamed attachment to truth, objectivity, and the importance of disciplinary knowledge, advocates appear more ambivalent when engaging with normative questions. Many claim that access to powerful knowledge is a requirement of social justice; however, the substantive account of social justice invoked remains nascent at best. A concern of this article is to provide a normative theoretical framework within which to place the social realist project and its commitment to the primacy of disciplinary knowledge. To do this, I turn to the Capabilities Approach, arguing that the affinities between the two are more than superficial. In fact, both approaches are responses to similar problems and, therefore, end up sharing intellectual commitments that very naturally bring them together.

In making this argument, I first outline the trajectory of the concept of powerful knowledge and the tense reception it has received from some social justice scholarship. I then outline the Capabilities Approach and its uptake in educational scholarship, arguing it provides a response to some of these concerns. From here I develop the connection between the two educational paradigms focusing on four areas of affinity. The first is the conceptual similarity between the ‘power’ of powerful knowledge and Nussbaum’s account of a capability. The second is their concern with the reduction of education to technical-instrumentalism, human capital, and other economically driven imperatives. The third is a respective commitment to the link between knowledge, human agency, and freedom. The fourth, a mutual rejection of relativism and embrace of a nuanced universalism.

Ultimately, by drawing together these two conceptually rich approaches to the aims and purposes of education, I hope to open a space for theorizing about capabilities and powerful knowledge that can resolve some of the problems in both. For powerful knowledge, the Capabilities Approach allows a more concrete explication of why access to disciplinary bodies of knowledge is of value to both individuals and society. On the side of the Capabilities Approach, engaging with the concept of powerful knowledge can help give a rationale for how educational knowledge fosters certain centrally important capabilities.

Powerful knowledge: an evolving concept

The concept of powerful knowledge is somewhat nebulous. Various scholars have added to its theorizing and there is ongoing discussion of how best to conceptualize the term (Muller and Young 2019; Deng 2021; Hordern 2021). At the same time, there has been scepticism surrounding its usefulness (White 2018; Eaglestone 2020). Here, I give a brief gloss of the concept and the shifting understanding of its conceptual basis.

Powerful knowledge was initially coined by Wheelahan (2007) and then significantly developed by Michael Young and Johann Muller (Young and Muller 2013; Muller and Young 2019). It has been particularly influential in the fields of History and Geography education (Hall and Counsell 2013; Maude 2016; Lambert 2019; Chapman 2021; Hordern 2022). Young and Muller’s initial explication argued that powerful knowledge is based on three distinctions:

• The distinction between ‘knowledge of the powerful’, and ‘powerful knowledge’.

• The distinction between non-specialized knowledge and specialized knowledge.

• The distinction between specialized powerful knowledge and specialized less powerful knowledge.

(Young and Muller 2013: 233)

The conceptual pair in the first bullet point refers to a proposed distinction between knowledge that powerful groups wield to preserve their status (knowledge of the powerful) and knowledge that contains its own power because of its specialized nature (powerful knowledge). The idea of knowledge having power in itself has motivated recent rethinking of the concept (Muller and Young 2019). The aim being to respond to critics’ concern that the focus on hierarchical knowledge structures effaces the arts and humanities which do not progress with the same conceptual logic initially suggested by Young and Muller.

Now powerful knowledge, according to Young and Muller, refers to at least three distinctive things. Firstly, academic disciplines which ‘produce specialised discourses that regulate and ensure reliability, revisability, and emergence’ (Muller and Young 2019: 209). Secondly, the link between the deep structure of these disciplines and the school curriculum which ought to ‘provide signposts to the structure of the subject before adepts are empowered to generate new ideas’ (p. 210). Thirdly, power as a generative capacity in which students can ‘make new connections, gain new insights, generate new ideas’ (p. 210). All these Young and Muller now understand as being part of the development of sets of ‘powers’ to do certain things. These powers are can only come from the highly specialized and differentiated nature of academic disciplines.

Powerful knowledge began, therefore, as an outcome of the social realist response to versions of relativism in the sociology of education. This theorizing aimed to provide a philosophical foundation for the objectivity of disciplinary knowledge. The term subsequently became popular in mainstream educational discourse, offering itself as a potential curriculum principle in which access to powerful knowledge is the central entitlement of all students. To fulfil this function adequately, the term had to expand its self-understanding to meet the disciplinary vagaries of the entire curriculum and not just those that aimed for empirical explanatory power. Such an account will need to engage with the distinction, and relationship between, disciplinary knowledge and subjects taught in schools. I return to this in a later section. In developing their project, Young and Muller have therefore tried to align powerful knowledge with the full range of subjects found within the school curriculum.

Powerful knowledge and social justice

If we look to two of the names most associated with the movement to root the school curriculum in powerful knowledge, Young and Wheelahan, we see a stated concern for social justice. Wheelahan argues that students lacking access to disciplinary knowledge, and perhaps instead put onto vocational pathways early on in their academic life, are being denied something to which they have a claim as citizens. In Wheelahan’s view, what they are owed is access to the ‘structuring principles of disciplinary knowledge’ (Wheelahan 2007: 637). Access to this knowledge is important because, following both Durkheim and Bernstein, it forms the precondition for the existence of society. Disciplinary knowledge is a central way society allows individuals to partake in collective representations that reach beyond the immediate, practical, and experiential towards the abstract and symbolic. To be locked out of this realm of knowledge is to be denied something ineradicably human and centrally important to participation in society.

It is worth noting, here, a difference between ‘disciplines’ and ‘subjects’. A variety of different positions can be taken on this issue (see Stengel 1997 for a discussion). Those seeking more wholesale reform of education often emphasize what Stengel calls the ‘discontinuity’ between academic disciplines and school subjects. Here, the latter are driven by aims and values extrinsic to acquiring disciplinary knowledge. This might include prioritizing activities ‘related to life skills, vocational preparation, reproductive activity, moral commitments’ (Stengel 1997: 594). In contrast, Winch argues that disciplines pursue ‘the acquisition, preservation, and evaluation of knowledge’ in a ‘systematic way, usually within an institutional framework’ (Winch 2023: 150). Subjects, on Winch’s account, are dependent on disciplines but not identical to them. School subjects, ‘are best seen as activities that promote acquaintance and even engagement with their associated discipline’ (p. 151). School subjects therefore act as sites for the recontextualization of disciplinary practices (Bernstein 2000). School subjects have the job of presenting material in a way that maximizes the possibility of comprehension by the student; recontextualization is the process by which disciplinary knowledge is reframed by teachers as subject knowledge. Students can be disadvantaged then both because of a lack of disciplinary knowledge within the curriculum and by poorly recontextualized knowledge within the subject. In a sense, the discontinuity account favours normative and ethical justifications of schooling whereas accounts such as Winch’s foreground the importance of academic knowledge. In exploring the philosophical connections between the Capabilities Approach and the concept of powerful knowledge, I hope to contribute to the bridging of such a gap.

When a student receives an education devoid of access to disciplinary knowledge, social realists in favour of powerful knowledge argue that something owed has not been given. We could, however, make this claim about all sorts of things and get no further towards a conception of justice that has systematic normative force. The distinction between pointing to a disadvantage and providing a theory of justice is an important one. Is the denial of powerful knowledge best understood as a concern on utilitarian, libertarian, or contractarian grounds? Or some other approach entirely? As it stands Wheelahan’s account does not tell us.

Turning to Young, the link between social justice and powerful knowledge is ostensibly driven by a concern with inequality. The reproduction of working-class underperformance motivated the initial project of the New Sociology of Education and inspired the desire to undermine the hidden assumptions of the curriculum (Young 1971). The argument here was that the knowledge of the curriculum itself was the driver of educational disparities because it enshrined a ‘cultural arbitrary’ that encoded the mores of the middles class as objective, rational, and superior rendering the culture of the working class as an aberrant ‘other’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990).

Young’s position regarding the nature of disciplinary knowledge has now changed whilst a stated commitment to addressing inequality has not. Now, for Young, it is not the knowledge that is the problem, rather unequal access to it (Young 2008). This argument has echoes of Gramsci’s concerns about the thin educational gruel afforded to the proletariat (Gramsci 1971), a weak and watered-down curriculum that ignores the boundaries and internal logic characteristic of academic disciplines. Like Young, Gramsci was concerned with the instrumentalism that flows from a vocationalist turn in the school curriculum. That said, beyond claiming powerful knowledge as an entitlement for all in a successful democracy, the link between powerful knowledge and social justice remains undertheorized. Young and Muller, at times, link the approach to a rights discourse, ‘If we accept the fundamental human rights principle that human beings should be treated equally, it follows that any curriculum should be based on an entitlement to this knowledge’ (Young and Muller 2013: 231). At best, claims to equality are necessary components of any credible theory of justice, but not sufficient. Amartya Sen makes the point that most thinking about justice values equality of something, the problem comes when specifying this more closely: equality of resources? Of individual liberty? Of outcomes? (Sen 1992). It is at this level of specificity that a more substantive account of justice needs to enter the picture. As I have suggested, the work of social realists is yet to provide this and, as I will argue, the Capabilities Approach can be invoked to fill this lacuna.

One argument against the social realist project is that the focus on the objectivity of disciplinary knowledge is that it implies that this knowledge is somehow ‘ethics-free’ (Zipin et al. 2015: 17). The concern here is that social realists want to separate knowledge from specifically ethical concerns, suggesting that the former is extricable from the latter. In making this argument, Zipin et al. argue that the evacuation of the ethical is ‘necessary to guarantee that compellingly powerful logic, from a high-minded plane beyond actual human activity’ (p. 22). The kind of objectivity social realists seek is therefore predicated on the idea that knowledge exists in an almost platonic realm, uncontaminated by the knowledge of the everyday and the community. Understandable though this critique is, given the dearth of engagement with theories of social justice from social realist scholars, I will suggest that this is not in fact the move that needs to be made by those that use a social realist framework. Rather, such a conception of knowledge in fact implies an ethical commitment to social justice, one rooted in the expansion of capabilities.

Others critique the way that the educational discourse surrounding powerful knowledge foregrounds the ‘shine’ at the expense of the ‘shadow’ (Rudolph et al. 2018: 24). Here the focus is on the way that colonialism is not isolated to territory, resources, and political systems. There is an epistemic legacy to the history of Western domination that means that disciplinary knowledge is ‘implicated by these colonial and racial violences’ (p. 24). In bifurcating the notions of knowledge of the powerful and powerful knowledge, these critics argue, we end up rarefying disciplinary knowledge and separating it from the history of violence that is in fact inextricable from it. Instead, we need to keep power and knowledge more tightly indexed to explain the continuing dominance of, for example, white, Western men within most curricula in schools and universities. The following exploration of how social realist accounts of powerful knowledge can be brought within the umbrella of the Capabilities Approach offers an attempt to respond to some of the above critiques whilst also enriching both theoretical paradigms.

The Capabilities Approach

The Capabilities Approach is both a normative theoretical approach to social justice and a way of conceptualizing human development. It was pioneered by Amartya Sen in the 1970s and developed significantly by Martha Nussbaum (Nussbaum 2000, 2011; Sen 2001). The guiding question of the approach asks: what is ‘each person able to do or to be?’ (Nussbaum 2011: 18). To answer this question is to give an account of the real opportunities members of society have available to them. This is distinct from functionings which denote the actual achievement of various capabilities. For example, two people might have the capability for play but only one indulge in it whilst the other foregoes the opportunity in order to study or work. Under the Capabilities Approach both have the capability whilst only one converts it into a functioning. To focus on capabilities rather than functioning is to prioritize what a person could do or be if they wanted, rather than what they in fact do achieve with their various capabilities. It is thus rooted in notions of freedom, agency, and opportunity rather than resources or the satisfaction of preferences (Nussbaum 2011; Robeyns 2017). The question of which capabilities are available to members of society therefore becomes the evaluative space within which we may judge policies and practices.

In developing this account of the affinity between the two approaches I will mainly draw on the work of Martha Nussbaum. Sen’s version of the approach is rooted, initially at least, in the desire to develop more accurate and far-reaching assessments of human well-being than the various utilitarian and welfarist approaches that dominated thinking in development economics. Nussbaum is more concerned with using the approach as a ‘normative political project aimed at providing the philosophical underpinning for basic political principles’ (Nussbaum 2000: 112). Nussbaum describes her approach as a ‘partial theory of justice’ in the sense that it demands a minimum threshold of capabilities that social and political arrangements must meet to be considered at least partially just. My aim is to help flesh out the nascent political justification of the powerful knowledge programme, if there is one, whilst also adding theoretical insights to the existing literature on education and capabilities.

Nussbaum distinguishes three fundamental types of capability: basic, internal, and combined. Basic capabilities are the ‘innate faculties of the person that make later developments and training possible’ (Nussbaum 2011: 24). Internal capabilities are the characteristics of a person including, for example, ‘personality traits, their intellectual and emotional capacities, states of bodily fitness and health’. These are not innate but rather forged through training and habituation ‘in interaction with the social, economic, familial, and political environment’. Combined capabilities can be considered internal capabilities plus the ‘political, social and economic environment’ (p. 21). This is an important distinction, as Nussbaum argues, because a society might be adept at developing certain internal capabilities—for example, the ability to deliberate and argue about political matters. Yet, there may in fact be no opportunity to use this capability because of a climate hostile to public reasoning and debate. The members of this society might therefore do well on internal capabilities but not combined ones.

Education and the Capabilities Approach

Whilst the capabilities literature is to some extent dominated by the figures of Nussbaum and Sen, there is a flourishing literature specifically concerned with its application to the field of education (Unterhalter 2003, 2013; Robeyns 2006; Walker 2006a, 2006b, 2019; Walker and Unterhalter 2007; Vaughan and Walker 2012; Wilson-Strydom and Walker 2015; Peppin Vaughan 2016; Lopéz-Fogués and Cin 2018). It is beyond the scope of this article to outline all the various streams and tributaries of this work, below is a summary of some of the key themes that bear on the current discussion.

Capabilities theorists concerned with education often make the claim that education can serve as a tool for the well-being of individuals and society at large (Wilson-Strydom and Walker 2015). Such a view typically involves a conception of ‘flourishing’ which has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of Eudaimonia and most famously propounded by Aristotle in Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle 2014). Under this conception of human flourishing, we cannot rely on subjective well-being, community cohesion, or economic growth as the barometers of educational success. Robeyns suggests that when we use the Capabilities Approach to do normative philosophical work, we are arguing for a conception of the aims that ‘morally sound policies should pursue’ (Robeyns 2017: 34). Scholars and educators can use the framework for ‘conceptual work’ in which education itself is reframed as ‘the expansion of a capability’ that might ‘have normative implications, for example related to the curriculum design’ (p. 33). There is, then, a direct connection between the Capabilities Approach and how we think about the purpose and justification of the curriculum.

Framing the curriculum this way moves us away from other dominant approaches that conceive of education as developing human capital, to take one common understanding of the purpose of education. The notion that education should be conceived as developing human capital has its roots in the late 1940s and 50s (Teixeira 2014). Early exponents included Theodore Shultz but it was majorly developed by the work of Chicago economist Gary Becker (Becker 1964). Becker defined human capital as ‘activities that influence future monetary and psychic income by increasing the resources in people’ (Becker 1964: 11). The approach sees education as effectively an investment in the future productivity of the worker. By focusing on how individuals can be economically empowered by education, the approach made great progress in moving away from ‘discourses that only focused on technical progress and macro-economic development’ (Robeyns 2006: 72). However, there remain problems with such an approach that I take up in a later section.

Ultimately, the Capabilities Approach reimagines education as a space for the expansion of the capability set of students so that they can lead flourishing lives and, therefore, forge successful societies. This focus on values and aims is what draws many towards the approach and gives it normative force in promoting educational justice.

Powerful knowledge as educational capability

The Capabilities Approach is set at a level of generality that allows it to be enhanced by engagement with other theoretical approaches. Such approaches can help in developing a ‘rich account of power that is supported by research in anthropology, sociology and other social sciences’ (Robeyns 2017: 193). In the field of education, the work of the social realists provides just such a theory in so far as it describes both the sociological basis of disciplinary knowledge and offers an account of how this knowledge might itself be powerful. In exploring the relationship between the Capabilities Approach and education, Walker and Unterhalter (2007) also make the argument that there needs to be an engagement with power and the various ways it might be distributed, theorized, and imagined within the space of education. The concept of power outlined by Young and Muller potentially provides this. It is the interdisciplinary nature of the Capabilities Approach that means it has the potential to form the ‘nexus connecting existing disciplinary frameworks’ (Robeyns 2017: 214). Understanding the ‘power’ of powerful knowledge helps forge this connection.

Recall that powerful knowledge now refers to the powers that students cultivate through access to bodies of disciplinary knowledge. How therefore do we determine the value of these various powers? If the power to make the judgements of a literary critic, to reason like a chemist, or conceptualize space like a geographer are valuable, there is clearly a need to specify what sort of value they have for those that possess them. As such, there is an inescapably normative and political dimension to selecting what kinds of knowledge should be a part of the curriculum. Nussbaum herself has given just such an account in her connection between literary study and the development of the ‘narrative imagination’ (Nussbaum 1997, 2010). For Nussbaum, the engagement with literary texts, and the close study of their formal and linguistic qualities, help us understand what it is like to be in someone else’s shoes. Nussbaum argues that the kinds of imaginative powers developed by the study of literature become essential for the compassion, empathy, and ethical judgement required of responsible citizens. In understanding what the ‘powers’ of various disciplines and school subjects are, then, we begin to give an account of how they promote centrally important capabilities.

Power and capability in Nussbaum and Young

There is an obvious connection between what Nussbaum means by a capability and what the more recent turn by Young and Muller mean by power. As philosopher Peter Morriss has observed, power is best understood as a disposition or capacity (Morriss 1987). To say that it is a disposition means that it is an enduring state of the person and their ability to do certain things under certain circumstances. Young and Muller draw on the work of Steven Lukes to make a similar point, namely that power need not be conceived as domination because we can draw a distinction between ‘power-over’ and ‘power-to’ (Muller and Young 2019). Capabilities share this feature to the extent they can be defined as the real opportunities for beings and doings (Nussbaum 2011; Robeyns 2017). They are distinct, therefore, from mere preferences. Both concepts are ultimately interested in expanding the ability of individuals to do things they have reason to value.

Returning to Nussbaum’s notion of combined capabilities, we see that capabilities are much like stable dispositions in so far as they require both the internal capabilities to do x (for example, the cognitive ability to read) as well as the external conditions that could make that ability meaningful (such as books and a culture that values and provides opportunities to read). Interestingly, in a reissued version of his work on power, Morriss refers to the Capabilities Approach as a logical extension of his ideas in the political domain. Morriss in fact suggests that talk of ‘powers’ would ‘better suit Sen’s purposes’ because it is the ‘more natural’ usage of the word (Morriss 1987: xxiii). Further, Morriss’ distinction between ‘ability’ and ‘ableness’ tracks directly Nussbaum’s distinction between internal and combined capabilities. An ability is ‘a property of the person, not of the environment’ (p. 80). Whereas an ableness requires the external conditions to allow the meaningful exercise of the ability. Morriss gives the example of the masticatory ability of the poor versus their ableness to eat food. The latter requires ample availability of food. The idea that the ‘power’ of powerful knowledge should be conceived of as ‘power-to’ renders it very similar to the concept of a capability. We have now a clear conceptual unity between the ‘power’ of powerful knowledge and a combined capability given by Nussbaum.

The rejection of instrumentalism and incommensurability in Young and Nussbaum

There are good reasons, then, to think that the social realists and the capabilitarians are working with a very similar concept in their respective approaches. In this section I suggest that this connection is not only conceptual but also deeply rooted in the kinds of theoretical approaches they reject. Establishing this further develops the space for a connection between the two theories.

One area in which this connection is pronounced is their respective commitment to the incommensurability of certain domains of human activity. To say that two or more things are incommensurable is to claim there is simply no single scale on which to place or evaluate them. Nussbaum is at pains to underscore the importance of the incommensurability of certain aspects of human well-being. For her, the central capabilities cannot ‘without distortion be reduced to a single numerical scale’ (Nussbaum 2011: 19). This is to say that no amount of the opportunity for play and creativity can be offset against the capability for, say, religious freedom. These two capabilities are not tradeable against one another, which is why they both need to be ensured as a matter of justice. Capabilities theorists are therefore committed to the notion of value pluralism. The notion that human beings value a diverse array of capabilities to be and do a multifarious range of things is central to the approach (Walker and Unterhalter 2007; Robeyns 2017).

This has direct parallels with the focus on the distinctiveness of disciplinary knowledge found in social realist scholarship and the concept of powerful knowledge. Returning to the idea that different domains of knowledge are characterized by different knowledge structures (Mackenzie 1998), we also see a commitment to the distinctiveness of different approaches to areas of human activity. At the same time, both social realists and capabilities scholars share a resistance to the tendency in policy-making to look for generic metrics with which to measure educational success (Young 2008; Counsell 2011). An emphasis on decontextualized thinking skills neglects the way that thinking academically takes place within different domains that are irreducible to one another. Epistemological differences are elided if we imagine the curriculum as a site for the cultivation of nonspecific competencies. In response, social realists argue, we need to see the curriculum as drawing students into a relationship with distinctive domains of knowledge and, like the different capabilities people may value, they cannot be reduced to one another or measured along a single scale.

A related concern of both approaches is a resistance to the instrumentalizing of various domains of human life. The Capabilities Approach can be seen as, in part, a response to the dominance of generic measures of human development such as Gross National Product (GNP) and Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The problem with these crude economic indicators is that it is impossible to make reliable inferences from GNP per capita to many of the central elements of human well-being that intuitively guide judgements about how well a society is faring. Nussbaum cites the ‘success’ of South Africa on GDP measures versus the demonstrable injustices within society itself (Nussbaum 2011). Sen pioneered several studies that similarly illustrated the ways societies might have superior health or educational outcomes despite lower GDPs (Sen 1992).

Applied to education, the critique of economistic models extends to the human capital approach. As mentioned earlier, a focus on human capital continues to see education as an arm of economic development but focuses on what individuals can do rather than aggregative measures. Education’s value, on this view, is measured by the extent it ‘allows workers to be more productive, thereby being able to earn a higher wage’ (Robeyns 2006: 72). Disciplinary knowledge therefore finds its purpose in promoting the skills and competencies valued by the demands of the economy. The study of English, Maths and Music relies on their role in promoting the earnings and productivity of the individual. Such an economistic understanding of education struggles to deal with the dimensions of education that cannot be reduced to metrics of productivity, growth, and income. It therefore instrumentalizes educational knowledge, imagining it as in service to economic aims. The problem with relying on the homo-economicus model of human behaviour is that it obscures a range of other motivations that influence human behaviour (Robeyns 2006; Osmani 2019). Underpinning the aims of education with a reductive account of its value cannot do justice to the variety of reasons students may have to pursue educational knowledge.

In this critique of many popular models for assessing education we see a direct parallel with the work of several social realist scholars. One thoroughgoing critique of the same problem has been given by Young and Muller in their three futures paper. Here, they suggest that the ‘technical-instrumentalism’ associated with human capital approaches is inevitably deficient as a justification for the school curriculum because it ignores the ‘irreducible differentiatedness of knowledge’ (Young and Muller 2010: 15). They dub the move towards a boundaryless curriculum rooted in the ever-shifting labour market as ‘Future 2’. This is to contrast it to a ‘Future 1’ conception of the curriculum in which knowledge is a fixed object impressed agonistically upon students. The former involves an overly socialized understanding of knowledge and the latter an undersocialized one. Instead, a ‘Future 3’ curriculum would recognize the objective and emergent nature of educational knowledge whilst understanding its social origins rooted in disciplinary communities.

Whilst this account of the three futures of education provides much by way of insight into where education goes wrong, it is still not sufficiently detailed an account to explain what, as a matter of a justice, the purpose of education is. The Capabilities Approach provides this theoretical framework in so far as it emphasizes the real opportunities people have to pursue valuable functionings. Capabilities are of intrinsic value for anyone regardless of what their specific projects and plans are. If access to disciplinary knowledge can be seen as promoting capabilities, we have a justification for it that can provide a compelling justification for the purpose of education. At the same time, bringing in the work of social realist scholars allows us to give a richer, more specific account of the role of disciplinary knowledge in fostering educational capabilities.

The point to labour here is not that economic growth or preparation for economic activity is unimportant. It is rather to say that they should be secondary and subsidiary to wider goals related to human flourishing (Nussbaum 2010; Walker 2012). This is the gap that the social realist position, with its emphasis on disciplinary knowledge, has often been reticent to engage with. However, given both the capabilitarian and social realist focus on resisting technical-instrumentalist paradigms of educational value, it is surprising that this is the case.

In Nussbaum’s formulation, educational knowledge should not see economic acquisitiveness or employability as ends in themselves because the ten capabilities in her list depict a version of a life worthy of human dignity in thicker and more detailed terms. For example, Nussbaum suggests the practical reason and affiliation are the two central capabilities, playing an ‘architectonic’ role within her version of the approach (Nussbaum 2000). This is important because it immediately allows us to ask what kinds of disciplinary knowledge contribute to these capabilities. The key point here is that powerful knowledge needs to be connected to aims, values, and purpose in a theorized way if it is to be a matter of justice that students acquire it. As Melanie Walker argues, we need, ‘not only a curriculum of knowledge and skills but also the difference between simply having knowledge and skills and having the commitment and values to use these to the benefit of others as well as oneself’ (Walker 2012: 459).

Knowledge, freedom, and agency as educational goals in Young and Nussbaum

As discussed above, much attention has been paid to the distinction between knowledge of the powerful and powerful knowledge. I argue in this section that a similar distinction exists within the capabilities literature that further forges links between the two approaches. Educationalists who emphasize how mainstream education reflects the ‘knowledge of the powerful’ tend to conceive of education through a more historical, sociological, or anthropological lens (Moore 2009). They see education as a key tool in the proliferation of unequal outcomes between groups, mainly along the lines of class, gender, and race (Maton and Moore 2010). The social realist project aims to focus on the emancipatory potential of powerful knowledge itself and argues that we can meaningfully separate these two projects.

In investigating how the Capabilities Approach might relate to education, Walker and Unterhalter recognize a similar bifurcation of purpose in educational scholarship. They identify a set of scholars who focus on ‘how schools reproduce inequalities and social injustices through “maldistribution and silencing”’ (Walker and Unterhalter 2007: 7) and a second group who ‘analyze aspects of the transformative space of schooling even if it is imperfectly realized’ (p. 7). My contention is that we can identify a link between education, agency, and freedom running through both approaches to education that put them in a shared philosophical space.

In developing an account of education as basic capability, Lorella Terzi points to both conceptual and empirical work that demonstrates the role of education in fostering agency and control over one’s life (Terzi 2007). Education acts as the precondition for a range of other functionings as well as being inherently important for well-being. In the words of Wolff and de-Shalit, it is a ‘fertile functioning’ (Wolff and de-Shalit 2007: 134). Despite this emphasis on the foundational importance of education for capabilities, Terzi’s account slips into a somewhat generic account of educational purpose in stipulating a list of competencies that might form the space of a Capabilities Approach to education. These include literacy, numeracy, science, and technology, as well as learning dispositions such as being able to concentrate. Resisting the conflation of general competencies with disciplinary knowledge is what the social realist account can provide with its emphasis on the distinctiveness of disciplinary knowledge. The danger with a Capabilities Approach is that it slips into a vague and underspecified account of things we might like students to be able to do without a theoretically rich account of educational knowledge. To do this is to miss the special role that school subjects play in allowing access to, and acquaintance with, disciplinary knowledge. In bringing the two together we can avoid being forced into binary choice between the ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’ accounts of the relationship between school subjects and academic disciplines mentioned above. Instead, acquainting students with disciplinary bodies of knowledge through school subjects promotes ethical and political aims. Again, we see both approaches able to enhance aspects of their respective theoretical approaches.

The link between knowledge and agency or freedom is present in much of the social realist literature. For example, Rata draws a link between democratic participation and disciplinary knowledge (Rata 2012). Similarly, Young points to the role of knowledge in allowing us to move beyond our experience (Young 2014). Much of this has its roots in the influence of Basi Bernstein, somewhat of a lodestar for the social realist understanding of the curriculum. In his work we can see a connection to the Capabilities Approach. A central, recurring focus for Bernstein’s project is the relationship between knowledge, its distribution, and the way this perpetuates inequality. As Mclean et al. argue, the inequalities in education that Bernstein points to are ‘constraints on what people can do and be’ (McLean et al. 2013: 33), language reminiscent of the Capabilities Approach itself. The upshot is that disciplinary knowledge is inherently moored to inequality in so far as it is unequally available to members of society. This therefore impacts the real capabilities individuals have available to them.

Mclean et al. go further in exploring the Bernsteinean understanding of knowledge in arguing that access to powerful knowledge is essential for the development of capabilities, specifically Nussbaum’s central capability of ‘sense, imagination and thought’ (p. 34). Again, this direct connection can be extended to the work of Young, Muller, and others to the extent that access to powerful knowledge is itself generative of powers within individuals. As argued above, these powers can be seen as capabilities. Access to disciplinary knowledge ‘bestows confidence, a sense of place in society and the means to participate in it’ (p. 35). What we see in both the social realist account of knowledge and Nussbaum’s Capabilities Approach is a concern with how access to education promotes freedom through capability expansion. Bernstein and the social realists give the relevant weight to the role of access to powerful knowledge in cultivating this freedom, which is missing from the capabilities literature and, by the same token, the capabilities literature fleshes out the social justice imperative implicit in the social realist account but as yet not fully developed.

The relationship between knowledge and freedom has also been drawn by Paul Ashwin. Ashwin makes the crucial point that any account of the importance of access to disciplinary knowledge must recognize that knowledge, in this sense, is more than a set of propositional facts. Rather, it is ‘the way of seeing the world that is offered by this body of knowledge which is critical’ (Ashwin 2020: 67). Facts are to a large extent inert if disconnected from their disciplinary systems of reference and inference (Derry 2017). It is in immersing and inducting students into unfamiliar but powerful ways of seeing the world that they expand their freedom, and on my account, their capabilities to act in and on the world.

Ashwin’s concept of ‘structured bodies of knowledge’ is helpful in rebutting the critique that powerful knowledge is merely reverence for authority and gatekeepers. Rather, these bodies of knowledge are fluid and changing but bound together through an ‘interrelated structure of knowledge that has been built in their discipline or professional area’ (Ashwin 2020: 68). Disciplines have boundaries but these are not carved in epistemological stone, rather they share a ‘family resemblance’ in the Wittgensteinian sense (Trowler 2014). At the same time students need not be passive receptacles for knowledge, rather they can be empowered to make their own imprint on the palimpsests of knowledge (McArthur 2012). It is this strong link between education and knowledge, on the one hand, and freedom and agency on the other, that bring the Capabilities Approach and the social realist account of knowledge together productively.

A new universalism in both approaches

The final area of correspondence between the Capabilities Approach and social realism lies in their mutual concern about the relativism present within theories of human development and educational theory respectively. Both argue for a return to a version of universalism as an antidote to this. However, this is not the crass universalism that has been subject to withering critiques by generations of feminist and postcolonial scholars. Instead, both emphasize a kind of objectivity and universalism that recognizes the importance of the social. Rather than fully recapitulate the arguments given by social realists in this regard I will identify the core features of this approach and then explore how this aligns with Nussbaum’s development of the Capabilities Approach, suggesting that their mutual concerns provide yet further impetus for bringing the two bodies of scholarship together.

Much of the intellectual project underlying the concept of powerful knowledge can be seen as the desire to give an alternative account of educational knowledge to that given by cultural reproduction theorists (Muller 2023). This sociological tradition often denies any separation between knowledge and the interests of the powerful. Similarly, much postmodern scholarship within the sociology of education repudiates the possibility of objectivity and, instead, emphasizes situatedness and subjectivity. Put together, the impact on educational theorizing within the sociology of education has been to valorize various ‘voice discourses’ in which the curriculum ought to be framed around the interests of the knower rather than the knowledge itself (Young 2008). Instead, the notion of powerful knowledge sees knowledge as having its own power. This is because of its differentiation and specialization, winnowed over time, in disciplinary communities. Through this it becomes ‘real’ in the sense of being emergent from those disciplinary communities but not reducible to them. It is in this sense that the knowledge is objective. At the same time, this means the constructivist model of knowledge that somehow sees knowledge as latent within the student, is challenged (Moore 2013). Instead, knowledge is a social activity that students can be inducted into. Crucially, then, powerful knowledge cannot be reduced to group identity and cultural traditions.

Walker, in defending epistemic capabilities as central to socially just education, echoes the concerns of social realist scholars in being sceptical of an ‘experience-and-identity-based epistemology whereby we can speak only of our own histories and perspectives’ (Walker 2019: 224). Here we see the same concern for shared knowledge, social in origin, but not reducible to the knower and their interests and experiences. Walker herself draws on Young’s work in recognizing that if the educational space is to genuinely foster capabilities, rather than entrench cultural biases, it needs a concept of powerful knowledge that ‘equips children and young people with conceptual languages to understand and interpret the world in ways which move them beyond daily experiences’ (Walker 2019: 227). In a sense Walker’s tentative engagement with social realist scholars is unsurprising, if we are interested in education as a space for the cultivation of capabilities then we must have a view on what knowledge in the curriculum moves students beyond the local and parochial. To focus on the latter would be to balkanize educational knowledge into identity groups, thereby abandoning the commitment to equality of capabilities.

Martha Nussbaum, in her work developing a novel account of the Capabilities Approach as a partial theory of justice, makes a similar set of arguments about the danger of relativism in relation to principles of justice. For her, the relativistic tendency within some social justice scholarship ought to be challenged and replaced with something robust enough to enable comparisons across societies. When addressing the justification for her Capabilities Approach, Nussbaum is alive to the idea that we might be better off with a ‘plurality of different though related frameworks’ rather than the universality espoused by her approach (Nussbaum 2000: 40). One concern of critics of universalism of any kind is that we may end up imposing ‘alien colonial ideas’ (p. 39) or ‘faddishly aping a western political agenda’ (p. 37). Such critiques ought to be taken seriously. In response, Nussbaum gives us several reasons to be sceptical that a sensitivity to cultural difference need entail evacuating the universalist baby from the social justice bathwater.

Nussbaum notes a tendency for those that emphasize cultural difference over universality to end up seeking as central, practices that are in fact fringe and extreme. This chimes with Kwame Appiah’s argument that often the concern to be attentive to difference might in fact create and fix those differences, a phenomenon he dubs the Medusa complex (Appiah 2005). The reason we cannot defer to cultural norms as the barometer of knowledge, educationally or ethically, is because those norms are gatekept in large part by religious and cultural leaders against ‘a backdrop of women’s almost total economic and political disempowerment’ (Nussbaum 2000: 42).

Equally, and perhaps more importantly, the argument from culture fails to recognize the traditions of resistance and struggle within cultures that can be supported and emboldened by the embrace of a universalistic framework. To demand that values be sequestered into neat cultural packages would be to abandon insurgent progressive challenges to the status quo. As Nussbaum puts it, sometimes, ‘it is the uncritical veneration of the past that is more “foreign”, the voice of protest that is more “indigenous” or “authentic”’ (p. 46). The East/West bifurcation demands a collective identity among implausibly heterogenous collections of ideas, cultures, and customs. Doing so shades into what Nussbaum calls ‘Normative Arcadianism’ in which the non-West is romanticized as, ‘a green, non-competitive place of spiritual, environmental, and erotic values, rich in poetry and music’ (Nussbaum 1997: 134). This mirrors the concern of Young, Moore, and others that a curriculum that seeks to simply reflect the culture of a particular group is bound not just to be epistemically shallow, but further entrench inequality. It freezes cultures and identities in place using the curriculum as its justification and, therefore, represents an ironically conservative understanding of education.

Nussbaum’s powerful rebuke to variants of cultural and epistemological relativism shares much with the social realist concerns about the status of knowledge within the curriculum. What then is Nussbaum’s justification for focusing on capabilities? The central point is that we need to consider the individual and the capability to function as the primary unit of evaluation. This is as opposed to the group, clan, tribe, or sect. This ‘ethical individualism’, as Robeyns describes it, is distinct from any metaphysical claim requiring individuals to be divorced from the deep ties of the community (Robeyns 2017). Instead, it simply observes that, because we each have only one life to live, we ought to focus on what each individual is actually able to do and to be (Nussbaum 2011). In her early work developing the approach, Nussbaum draws heavily on both Marx and Aristotle in putting forward a concept of nondetached objectivity to elucidate the notion of a capability. This entails that we do not look at human lives from an ‘alien point of view, outside of the conditions and experience of those lives—as if we were discovering some sort of value-neutral scientific fact about ourselves’ (Nussbaum 1987: 38). Notice here the similarities with the social realist emphasis on a social conception of objectivity—which is to say an escape from relativism that does not entail positivism. By objective, Nussbaum argues we do not ‘take each group or culture’s word for it’ (p. 38) on matters of valuable human capabilities and functionings. Cultures can cultivate human flourishing in myriad ways but can also blight functioning when a deferent attitude to custom and dogma prevail. Nussbaum therefore seeks to find an objective framework for human flourishing from within human life rather than external to it. She notes, ‘the collapse of metaphysical realism is taken to entail not only the collapse of essentialism about the human being but a retreat into an extreme relativism’ (Altham and Harrison 1995).

This sentiment is remarkably close to the concern of social realists such as Moore, Young, and Muller in that understanding something as ‘social’ does not entail it is arbitrary, subjective, or without robust and defensible foundations. Nussbaum is critical of the way in which a denial of objectivity leads to the evaluation of normative practices as merely concerned with power in which truth derives as a result of one's contingent position within society (Nussbaum 1987). The parallel with Young’s notion of knowledge of the powerful is obvious. In both cases, the retreat from objectivity gives us no firm ground from which to make substantive claims about justice and knowledge respectively.

Conclusion

This article has made the case that powerful knowledge, with its roots in the social realist conception of knowledge, can be enriched and enhanced when brought within the theoretical paradigm of the Capabilities Approach. At the same time, the burgeoning literature exploring the relationship between the Capabilities Approach and education can be similarly enhanced by the notion of powerful knowledge. I have suggested there are four distinctive areas of affinity between the two approaches that make this case compelling. First, the recent theorizing around the ‘power’ of powerful knowledge is very close to the idea of a capability. In fact, under Morriss’ view of power, they are conceptually indistinguishable. Second, both approaches reject the move towards both technical-instrumentalist and human capital approaches to education. Such views abandon the distinctive and incommensurable nature of much of human activity, including the knowledge of the school curriculum. Third, I suggested that both approaches share a deep and nontrivial commitment to freedom and agency. Lastly, I explored their respective commitments to a nuanced version of universalism that remains sensitive to the importance of the social.

The crucial point for education, is that we cannot simply assume that the dissemination of powerful knowledge is sufficient for treating individuals as ends in themselves with an interest in living lives by their own lights. To ensure this we need to argue why they might have such an interest. It is the Capabilities Approach, and in particular Nussbaum’s account, that offers such an argument. However, it is equally the case that Nussbaum’s case for the Capabilities Approach can be enriched by a more explicit engagement with the role of disciplinary knowledge, recontextualized by school subjects, in fostering the kind of agency that can promote the development of capabilities.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jan McArthur for her helpful comments on a draft of this paper and her ongoing support.

References