educator Paulo Freire, and his concept of "critical consciousness".19 As we have seen, the liberal perspective attributes poverty in large part to deficiencies in basic education and other skills (i.e. "life" skills, job skills). In contrast, those Committed to the critical perspective view both poverty and illiteracy as products of a third factor--the dynamics of class inequality in a capitalist economic system.20 Thus, while liberals see literacy education as a technical process of compensating for cognitive skill deficiencies among the poor (to permit them to better adjust to the needs of the economy), adherents of the critical perspective view such efforts both as ineffective-because they do not deal with the root cause of poverty--and as oppressive--because they better accommodate the poor to the structures which exploit them. 21 For their part, they would make adult basic and literacy education a vehicle for the awakening of critical social consciousness among members of subordinate social classes and a means of support for collective efforts to radically transform the class system. 22

The two contending perspectives on illiteracy, the conservative and the critical, dissent from the hypothesis that underlies the liberal perspective, i.e. that illiteracy is one of the main causes of poverty. Each offers an alternative interpretation of the illiteracy-poverty link, the conservative perspective arguing that illiteracy is a distinctly secondary cause of poverty, and the critical perspective suggesting that both illiteracy and poverty are the products of the capitalist economic structure.

However, an even more striking difference among the three perspect.ives lies in the divergent political visions which underly them. Illiteracy is closely related to poverty and class inequality--the most explosive and divisive issues in political thought and practice--and each of the three perspectives on illiteracy is based on a different set of ideological assumptions regarding the origin of inequality and the question of what, if anything, can or should be done about it. These assumptions, as drawn from the political philosophies of liberalism, conservatism and critical (socialist and Marxist) thought, saturate each level of the three perspectives, from views on the meaning and significance of illiteracy to such seemingly purely technical matters as the definition of literacy, the objectives of literacy programs and the question of instructional methods and content.

The specifically political implications of literacy work have not been widely recognized in Canada, largely because the long-dominant liberal perspective has represented literacy education as a neutral, technical matter of remedial "skill acquisition". However, adherents of the critical perspective charge that the very claim of being 'above politics' itself serves a significant political function: it obscures the manner in which literacy education, as based on the liberal perspective, secures the adjustment of the poor to the economic and political status quo. 23