The explicitly political and ideological dimension in the liberal perspective is more clearly evident in an account of a project in British Columbia intended to "measure and quantify the effects of life or coping skills on the employability and independence of ABE students", termed Project SQUABEL (The Systematic Quantification of Adult Basic Educational Learning). The report states that:

SQUABEL hopes to devise an instrument which will measure the unemployability and dependence of institutionally diagnosed unemployables .... A question sure to arise is: "What criteria are used to develop or formulate questions for the instrument?" With the information obtained from an employer opinion survey (information is presently being solicited from agencies such as Canada Manpower, Unemployment Insurance, major corporations, and personnel hiring agencies). SQUABEL will be able to delineate in as exact a fashion as possible, those characteristics which employers feel constitute the ideal employee. Already, from the several questionaires returned, a pattern is beginning to develop. In addition to academic skills, which thus far, employers have been rating at an average of 60% in importance, characteristics such as interpersonal relations, motivation, adaptability, punctuality, and so on, have received ratings much higher. ...The. next step in the project will be to present the results of the employer survey to the.ABE faculty members...and obtain from them exactly which of the employer-demanded characteristics are addressed within the scope of the existing Adult Basic Education program. If none of the desired traits are visible within the ABE frame of reference, it will of course, be an obvious indication that ... something is sorely missing in the curriculum and it will be up to the program faculty to make applicable adjustments.... If the aim of the SQUABEL project is met, the student graduating from future courses in Adult Basic Education will not merely be more academically employable, he or she will have been given the added plus of enhanced independence from social institutions which until now, have been such a permanent fixture in their lives.22

In this account, it is clear that "adaptation" to the "needs of the economy" is not a neutral process in a political sense. That is, the matter is approached solely from the point of view of economic elites, and the aim is to help the poor adapt to their needs. Clearly, critical awareness of political, social and economic reality is not one of the "coping skills" demanded by employers, and in fact, would necessarily run counter to the theme of social control implicit in the traits of "adaptability", "punctuality" and "motivation". Given this fact, the notion of "enhanced independence" might be more accurately termed "domestication".

Clearly, while the liberal perspective does not openly ‘announce' its ideological character as earlier perspectives on illiteracy have done, the theme of ideological incorporation and social control is just as strong. In fact, the very facade of neutrality and technical rationality is itself patently ideological. It mystifies and obscures the political and ideological dimensions of language and literacy, and reduces literacy simply to the psychological dimension (i.e. cognitive skills) and the economic dimension (a means of adapting the economy). The denial of the political and ideological dimensions of language and literacy is consistent with the tendency of post World War II liberal social science, which has claimed to have transcended ideology, e.g. the "end of ideology" thesis of sociologist Daniel Bell. 23