Rethinking Antiracist Education in the Light of the Capability Approach

In anti-racist education, it is important to reflect on the pitfalls of the ideal of equality in order to obtain greater social justice. Too narrow an understanding of equality without an acknowledgment of the individual's ethnic identity provides fragile grounds when dealing with the social and cultural recognition of minority pupils. The capability approach contributes to discussing theoretically the anti-racist dialectical aim of equality and difference. In assessing the individual's capability to combine his/her own substantive freedoms within his/her specific living, it also gives the possibility to evaluate the concrete social arrangements and resources available to minority pupils. If considering the curriculum as a resource, French and Norwegian school discourses in civic education offer too few conversion possibilities for minority youth to expand their capabilities in the multicultural society and to use their own voice in order to build self-governance based on self-mobilization and self-articulation of concrete cultural and social aspirations.