Furthermore, it has rarely been the day to day hardships and limitations experienced by illiterate adults which have been the main factor in provoking public attention to the problem of illiteracy. Instead, the principal catalyst has been the concern on the part of dominant classes about threats to the existing power structure posed by the impoverished groups to which illiterate adults belong. 13

Elite Concerns

These threats, such as crime and political protest, have arisen out of the social disruption accompanying major shifts in the capitalist accumulation process in Canada, including its consolidation, deepening or widening. We can identify three principal periods of transition. The first was the rise in the mid-1800's of the capitalist factory system in an economy dominated by agriculture and craft production. The second was the demise of small-scale competitive capitalism and the rise of large-scale monopoly capitalist enterprise in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The third occurred in the 1950's and early 1960's, when Canada completed its transition from an economy still heavily engaged in labour-intensive industry to a modern, capital-intensive corporate economy. We are already acquainted with the last transition as it figured prominently in the discussion in the previous two chapters.

Each of these transitional periods has been characterized by distorted and uneven economic and social development, and has called forth -a large, vulnerable and ill-educated surplus population suffering low wages, high rates of unemployment and general insecurity. In the mid-1800's, the surplus population was largely composed of Irish immigrants who were originally drawn to Upper Canada to work in lumbering and the building of canals, roads and railways, and who later became the new industrial proletariat. The transition to monopoly capitalism of the late 1800's and early 1900's saw the recruitment of a surplus population of native and immigrant labourers, who made possible the expansion of sectors like farming, lumbering, mining, and railway construction. Finally, as we have already seen, the transition to a modern corporate economy in the 1950's produced a large surplus population of displaced hinterland residents and recent immigrants.

Insecure, impoverished and suffering from severe social problems, the surplus population of each period has in various ways posed a serious challenge to established social and political leadership in Canada. Economic and political elites have reacted to these threats to their positions not by ameliorating the harsh economic conditions responsible for the social disruption, which their own vested interests in the existing system have prevented them from questioning, but by pursuing strategies for the social control and ideological incorporation of the victims of these conditions--the poor. For this reason, they have at various times been receptive to the theories advanced by educators and others which attribute the cause of various threatening conditions associated with poverty, and even poverty itself, to the phenomenon of illiteracy, and have supported literacy programs which promise to channel or defuse their effects.