This paper explores and characterizes the relationships between human development and education using critical literature review to engage the strands of argument for basic social justice and quality of life at the crossroads of economics, ethics and politics. The oversold conventional approach to development as an income line, people as a means and markets as a focus of concern has long lost its shine on account of the rise of the Human Development Paradigm which accords education a fundamental role in equipping people with competencies and capabilities to enlarge their choices and enhance their well-being. Accordingly, education offers a new language of hope and possibility about what people can actually acquire overtime to choose their kind of life they value; brings into its orbit social justice and equity by training people not just as an economic enterprise but as an attribute of power relations in the structure of any society; and measures learner evaluation not just in terms of literacy tests but people‟s ability to express their views. As education constitutes both a foundation and a vehicle for building and extending people‟s capabilities, the risk is great that the manner in which it is organised and transacted could always be politically manipulated by the elite and economically deployed as a means to produce an under-class. This paper, therefore, tempers optimism with realism and notes that any given education system is a manifestation of the society that embraces it. Notwithstanding this proclivity, the human development paradigm provides the best chance yet for a life people have reason to value because it offers an ethical-political guide to the imperative of social change and economic growth, using education as a compass; and disproving pay as an exact index of merit.