South Africa is currently engaged in a process of radical political and social change. The new democratic South Africa is envisaged as a country of peace and prosperity, where all South African citizens will be able to live a quality life. This book is primarily about the conception of human existence, and thus human wellbeing, which should be valued as the most fundamental and indispensable element of successful social transformation.

Political and social transformation in South Africa has as its ultimate goal the improvement of quality of life for all its residents. Ultimately education should also be conceived as an improvement of the quality of life of individuals and societies, and the development of total human beings. In this regard, education is often seen as ‘the repository of hope’ for the country. However, there is reason to suspect that the following is actually the case:

• 1. Political and social transformation in South Africa is mainly conceived in strategic terms, assuming that observable and measurable organisational changes are all there is to transformation.

• 2. The contribution made by education in South Africa, especially with regard to social transformation, is thought of mainly in cognitive terms. The assumption is that education is essentially concerned with cognitive development, and its defining purpose is instrumental.

This book will challenge these two assumptions. It attempts to reconfigure the conceptual landscape in terms of which we think about rationality, social transformation and education. It aims to counteract the intellectual and instrumental bias in the currently dominant ways of thinking about education, and to retrieve a sense of what it would be like to think of education in terms of cultivating humanity, as a key to the profound transformation of our society. It intends to relocate the emotions in our conception of transformation and education, because without that, education will fail to help South African society to transform into a society where most people are able to live lives of an improved quality. Martha Nussbaum's theory of the emotions, appraising emotions as ‘intelligent responses to the perception of value’, has important consequences for the theory of practical reason. Her theory helps us to grasp the relationship between emotions and various conceptions of the human good. Her view suggests that without emotional development, a part of our reasoning capacity will be lacking.