Human Development and Higher Education

• In Event: Multiuniversity in Sustainable Education

Abstract

During a long period of our recent history, the main criterion to judge the progress of
nations emphasized the perspective of measuring the welfare through the goods acquired for
each country in terms of the Gross National Product (GNP) per capita. Somehow this
perspective was in accordance to Rousseau’s ideas about inequality in terms of the way in which goods are distributed, but particularly this perspective was pointing all the political concerns towards the aim of improving their economic indicators, since this was as a trusted way to
achieve the desire national grows. However, the turning point towards considering human
freedom as a more valuable outcome than economic wealth was the construction of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in 1990. In 2010, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the
UNDP, they published The Real Wealth of Nations: pathways towards human development. In
this report the paradigm shift is emphasized to distinguish human development from economic
development.
It is clear that material goods are fundamental but as means to develop our freedom. And our freedom is real as long as we can “use our knowledge and talents to shape our destiny”. In this regard valuing health and educational levels is more important than assessing the richness of nations just by considering economical indicators such as the GNP per capita.
The work undertaken by the United Nations Development Program has been influenced
by Amartya Sen’s (1981; 2002) work, which promotes the capabilities approach as the basis to design the ways to evaluate human development. Sen’s approach suggests that we should gather the available information about health, education and work opportunities in order to consider the strategies that are followed in the places where more people are achieving better standards in the development of their freedom. From this approach we should consider that education is a way to enjoy the opportunity of increasing our knowledge and to develop our capabilities, in order to perform professionally in the area that we like the most. In this regard education is meaningful as a way to achieve higher levels of human development, instead of being a way to “create human capital”. The idea of education as a means to transform humans into “human capital” is perverse because it subordinates education as one part of the economical chain, in which we are valuing money or “capital” as the maximum goal instead of human freedom.
It is critical to make a change in the way in which we value “capital” and “higher
education.” Capital must be subordinated as a mean to foster opportunities for human
development. Human development should be the maximum goal of higher education to allow
students to achieve higher levels of freedom and commitment with their own ways to be creative and to engage in the kind of life that they value the most and to give back to their own society and to the world.

Author

• Abel Ruben Hernandez Ulloa, Universidad de Guanajuato