The nature of this language corresponds to the work of its users, a class "in the middle", ironing out bureaucratic wrinkles and laundering unpleasant realities. It's the language... of euphemism, of small problems and hard solutions. It's language that has only words for the middle ground, of toothless reform, language which divides history between neurotic revolutionaries and encrusted reactionaries as a defence for the "reasonable" people in the middle who won. Or that lets you analyze a strike, "taking both sides into account", the boss offering $2.00 an hour, the union demanding $3.00, permitting you to come up with the "reasonable" solution of $2.50 an hour. It's language that does not tell the reality of bringing up a family on that amount 55

Conventional reading instruction (as based on a liberal perspective) conceals this vital ideological relationship of language to reality behind a technocratic facade (i.e. language as merely a neutral technical tool, reading simply as decoding). As a result, it imposes this middle class vision "behind the backs" of the learners from working class homes, and so serves to alienate them from their own political, economic and social realities. According to Martell:

the further down a child is on the class scale, the less appropriate is this middle-class language to him, the more it obscures his reality .... 56

What is not permitted in the classroom is language which could serve to reveal this reality, which could help working class children to:

define their class enemies and understand their friends, both in terms of their present oppression and their future resistance to it... (or) ... find a place for themselves inside a larger movement of working-class people 57

Martell believes that the imposition of this middle class language is an important cause-of illiteracy among working class children. He argues that:

the more oppressed a kid is (the further down the class scale he is), the more alienated he will become from a language that doesn't recognize or try to do anything about his oppression, and the worse he will be able to handle it. Thus we get the remarkably close correlation we do between socio-economic class standing and reading scores. In other words, kids from working class backgrounds are being made "dumb", a significantly double-edged word, meaning both someone without use of words and someone who's unintelligent. What's being created, to use Paulo Freire's phrase, is a "culture of silence", the silence deepening with the depth of the oppression 58

Such youth are already socially and economically marginal; the school system merely confirms or ratifies their marginalization. Because all of this happens according to seemingly "fair" and "objective" criteria. the youth are persuaded that their lack of academic success is a result of personal inadequacy, and that they, like their parents before them, are only fit to be the "cheap labour" required by the low-pay service sector industries and labour-intensive manufacturing plants of the economy.59 In this way, schooling contributes to the continuation over time (or in Freire's words, "reproduction") of this highly exploited segment of the working class. Of course, this is not an intended outcome, either on the part of the school system or the teachers. However, as Hautecoeur points out, neither is it accidental. That is, it is the predictable result of the manner in which the form and content of education in a capitalist society are, as Freire observes, shaped according to the needs and interests of the dominant, i.e. capitalist, class.