On the other hand, the socialization received by children from professional and white collar homes is quite different. They are generally tracked into university preparatory programs in which lessons in obedience are tempered by opportunities for flexibility and self-direction, reflecting the social relations of their probable future managerial and professional occupations. In this way, the "hidden curriculum" of rules, rituals and authority patterns in schools secures the acquiesence of youth to their future positions; in the class structure--including for some of them, slots at the very bottom of that structure.

Reading and Writing

Martell is referring here to the process of education. However, the academic content also helps to socially reproduce candidates for low wage occupations. One of the ways in which this occurs is through what Jean-Paul Hautecoeur, an adult educator employed by the Quebec Ministry of Education, calls the "production of illiteracy".50 That is, many youth from impoverished "sub-proletarian" working class homes attend "special" classes and vocational programs until age 14 and longer and yet remain illiterate. Their academic.,failure both ratifies and helps perpetuate their marginal status. Hautecoeur so contends that their failure to learn to read is not "accidental" or due to personal deficiencies. Rather, it is the systematic result of, among other things, the way that reading and writing instruction are carried on. 51

Conventional reading instruction, as it is carried -on in Canadian schools, (and in most adult basic education classes as well), is implicitly premised on a conception of language as a purely technical tool, and a complementary conception of reading as the purely technical act of recovering the 'neutral' information which printed or written language is thought to convey. 52 However, as Freire points out, language is not neutral; it is an expression of consciousness which conveys information, but also implicitly expresses attitudes, values, views of the world, which are shaped by one's existential position--economic, political, cultural, etc. If one lives within oppressive social relationships, they will find expression in one's consciousness and, ultimately, in the language one uses to discuss reality.53 For example, Serge Wagner contrasts the . language and grammar of the French-speaking Quebec working class with the academic French spoken by the dominant class:

Take, for example, the word "work". Although the significance is the same, what it means differs according to whether the word is used by a laborer or worker, or by a senior executive or a boss. When one considers language from a moral and normative point of view and the norm suggested is "good French", you are not only imposing the language of the boss on the worker but also his vision of society 54

According to George Martell, the language, and therefore the "vision of society" (i.e. the ideology) which is dominant in classrooms in Canada, is that of the middle class--one that reinforces existing power relationships: