CHAPTER 13

CONCLUSION

Canadian ABE in a Time of Crisis

It is clear that illiteracy is intimately associated with the dynamics of class inequality, and that educational responses to it have had, implications for the course of on-going class struggles in Canada. Central to this link between adult literacy education and these larger struggles have been the perspectives through which educators have viewed illiteracy. As Freire has so persuasively argued, the work of literacy education has in addition to the technical aspect of encouraging the development of the cognitive skills of reading and writing, a socio-political one, that of shaping class-based world views and identities. In his view, the two functions are indivisible, and how they come to be carried out in classrooms and program settings depends to a large degree on the particular perspectives on illiteracy which provides the assumptions upon which educational activities, methods, and materials are based. As we have seen, they can be ones that help shape a setting in which illiterate adults, who are frequently among the most oppressed members of the working class, become more aware of inequality and develop means of collectively dealing with it, or conversely, a setting in which the underlying phenomena of class and class domination are implicitly "out of bounds" as objects of analysis, and these adults are merely helped to become better integrated into the class structure which subordinates them. From this point of view, perspectives on illiteracy, both dominant and alternative, have important implications for the practical fortunes of particular social classes. Adult basic educators have always been political actors, whether they have been conscious of this fact or not, and the various perspectives on illiteracy have been some of the most important ideological raw materials from which their roles have been fashioned.

However, the prevalent view among adult educators of their role in the development of literacy and basic education opportunities in Canada is an essentially uncritical one: the humanitarian struggle to sway a well-meaning but uninformed public, and its governmental representatives, about the need to support their work with adults who suffer from a handicap, illiteracy, which helps to keep them in poverty. As we have seen, when the missing class dimension is inserted, the picture which emerges is quite different: adult basic educators as professionals who, despite their humanitarian intentions and frequently genuine contributions, often serve class interests far removed from, and opposed to, those of the illiterate adults whom they aim to represent, and whose actions in certain ways and in certain critical historical moments have helped to guarantee the survival of the very economic institutions which periodically require and reproduce an ill-educated and impoverished surplus population of wage labourers.