Daniel Lavan, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto

As a “new scholar” in the field and a first time CIES conference participant, I have no historical sense of the degree to which people typically give a second (or even a first) thought to the theme of the conference chosen by its organizers. It was evident in Salt Lake City that most participants ignored it, which is understandable since it is challenging enough to summarize one’s work of several months or even years in the fifteen minutes allotted. Because of the nature of my own research, I immediately had occasion to question the choice of “Development as Freedom: the Role of Education” as a theme, in so far as it was inspired by Amartya Sen’s book, and especially since the exposition of Sen’s ideas presented on the CIES conference website was misleading and its final sentence bewildering.

The website’s attempt at a synopsis of Sen’s ideas conflated various of the book’s arguments. Unfair to Sen, it gave an exaggerated impression of the role he sees for education in expanding all of the diverse freedoms he specifies. The synopsis seemed to attribute to Sen its ultimate statement: “To be free to lead a good life, not to be cut off prematurely, not to have to suffer escapable ailments is the best and final objective of schooling worldwide.” Sen does not argue that life expectancy and disease prevention can be improved or should be addressed primarily through “schooling” or other educational interventions. Nor would Sen agree that achievement in these two minimal measures of material well-being are “the best and final objective of schooling worldwide.” The phrase “to be free to lead a good life” is also far too vague to capture the concept of human agency that Sen repeatedly insists is central to his thought. Furthermore, the CIES synopsis gave an extremely exaggerated impression of the extent to which Sen’s book actually explores the topic of education at all.

Sen’s overall project is to admonish Neo-liberalism to rediscover, recuperate, and embrace its roots in classical Liberalism as it was spawned by the Enlightenment thought of the eighteenth century, and particularly in the writings of Adam Smith, from whose Wealth of Nations Sen cites numerous passages in support of his arguments for complementing economic indicators of development with broader human concerns. Sen makes the useful conceptual move of gathering under the rubric “freedom” what have generally been considered disparate development goods (social services, economic opportunities, food and other securities, healthy environment, political liberties). This synthesis permits a development perspective that seeks the expansion of human capabilities. As mentioned, Sen quite correctly recognizes that the concept of human agency must be foundational to such a perspective and the lynch pin around which true development can roll forward. Those of us primarily interested in education, however, should note that in Development as Freedom, both the meaning of agency and the question of how it can be created, through education or otherwise, remain largely unexplored. These issues have been far more comprehensively developed and emphasized by earlier authors. To celebrate Sen’s work as a turning point in development theory, as many seem to have done, is to display significant ignorance of a long tradition of theoretical counter-currents to the developmentalist and neo-Liberal mainstream. Sen’s unreferenced re-derivation of the idea that responsibility requires freedom, as well as the brevity of his catalogue of thinkers who have previously conceptualized development in terms of human capabilities, or agency, or liberty, both seem to demonstrate Sen’s own lack of awareness of vigorous counter-currents that existed even throughout the developmentalism period. Central to these counter-currents is the entire oeuvre of Paulo Freire, the relevance of which far transcends its relegation to now “surpassed” historical Marxist paradigms. For Freire, a rich concept of positive human freedom, and the belief that human development consists precisely in such freedom, were always the basis of educational theory and practice. According to Freire, the existential vocation of the human being is to become more fully human – a process which entails the liberating recognition of one’s human agency and the empowering animation of that agency as the force that creates history when it refuses to passively accept the historical situation in which it finds itself.

In Development as Freedom, Sen argues with a calm and eloquent passion for greater spending on basic education and other public services, because mere access to such services represents a kind of freedom, under his definition, and, in the case of education, because it engenders greater political freedom, the exercise of which engenders still more freedoms. However, Sen does not raise, or even signal, the theoretical and empirical problem of the enduring archaic forms of basic education’s provision, of its explicit and implicit curricula, and therefore of its actual empirical effects upon freedom in any given setting. Sen simply posits that education helps people to have wider options and to lead more fulfilling lives. He does not explore what kind of education can be an actual instantiation of freedom as autonomy or choice, and what basic educational experiences might best lead to freedom as democratic development with political enfranchisement, empowerment, and meaningful participation.

This can only be a minor criticism of Sen, who after all did not set out to write a book on education. That his treatment of education, and of the way in which it fits into his overall policy prescriptions, is superficial or simplistic is only a slight failing of a book on development economics. In a friendly critical spirit I wish to more seriously find fault with the choice of Sen’s book as the basis of the conference theme. The “Role of Education” in “Development as Freedom” has been a far more central subject of Dewey (not cited by Sen!), Freire, and the Faure Report, to name just three very old examples in development education literature in which human agency, freedom, and growth are explored in terms that range from their most philosophical-existential foundations up to their political potential for societal transformation and development. My question is: why choose Sen as an occasion to investigate these themes? Have texts focusing on education, from which a conference theme could be derived, been exhausted in just 48 years?