Free Choice of Education? Capabilities, Possibility Spaces, and Incapacitations of Education, Labor, and the Way of Living One Values

Abstract

This chapter deals with the reconciliation of (pre)conditions and possibilities of access and choice of education and the contemporary educational dominating discourse in Danish education policies, i.e., the culture of testing and competition. Thus, inter alia, the theoretical approach of the capability approach is used to sort out opportunities of processes of freedom in order to provide a theoretical framework and to describe with respect to the discourse of competition dominant influences, for example, the family background as well as international organizations, on possibilities of having actual free access to attain the education one has reason to value. The probability of having free choice of education, labor, and the way of living one values is not at least related to both individual and external conversion factors, whereas the latter is severely affected by education to labor disregarding the lack of preconditions and therefore worsening the situation of vulnerable youth. With respect to the situation of vulnerable young people in Denmark, this chapter emphasizes, among other things, material from the Danish case study (see chapter 10.2.5). Pursuing the logic of the framework of the capability approach, the concept of external and individual capabilities is applied and the notion of manifest and latent incapacitations is introduced in order to point out individual, institutional, and societal obstacles concerning the aim of accessing free choice of educational trajectory one has reason to value.