 <p>The reason your initial attempt is not working is that you're attempting to capitalize a symbol or a string that represents the field name and not the actual variable.</p> <p>You could do something like this and then the data would be capitalized before it's sent to the view.</p> <pre><code>@sexes = Sex.all @sexes = @sexes.each{|sex| sex.name.capitalize} </code></pre> <p>or</p> <pre><code>@sexes = Sex.all.each{|sex| sex.name.capitalize} </code></pre>