Dunn and Dandurand clearly point here to the social control function of ABE. However, lest their statements be taken to suggest that ABE as pursued under the Canada Manpower Program has been nothing more than an expedient tool for the economic and political stabilization of the capitalist system in Canada, it must be recalled that the theory and practice of ABE is based on a distinctive theoretical analysis of poverty. The liberal perspective is clearly more than a bare rationalization of ruling class interests. Nevertheless, in spite of its "relative autonomy" in a theoretical sense, the liberal perspective has, like the other perspectives on illiteracy in Canada's past, played an important ideological role. Wachtel highlights this specifically ideological function:

Manpower programs, educational assistance, and the like are the principal policy results of the contemporary liberal human capital approach to social mobility. All of these programs are based on an essentially untested view of the labor market: namely that personal characteristics over which the individual has control are the major causes of unequal and low incomes. These programs are quite similar in their ideological premise to virtually all the poor laws of capitalist society, starting with the Elizabethan poor laws....The poor are incapable of managing their own affairs so they must be "social worked" to adapt to the rigor and needs of an industrialized and urbanized society. This view of poverty is wrong in theory, in fact, and in social values. The causes of poverty lie outside the individual's control in markets of labor and capital and class background.17

Wachtel points out that this approach, i.e. of blaming the poor for their own condition, "has received wide acceptance precisely because it has been conveniently supportive of existing social arrangements and our prevailing social ideology".18

Adaptation

To summarize our analysis to this point, there is strong evidence to suggest that the liberal perspective, like other perspectives on illiteracy before it, has achieved its dominant position in ABE policy and practice not because of its scientific validity (which is in serious question), but rather in large part because of its ideological value for economic and political elites in providing a means of social control of the surplus population. However, one might find it difficult to accept this conclusion for the reason that the liberal perspective doesn't sound ideological in the same sense as the other three perspectives we have considered, which have taken explicitly partisan moral and political positions.