Liberal Adult Basic Education

We have seen how the youth education system responds to the need of the capitalist class for the reproduction of a stratum of cheap labour in the working class. Adherents of the critical perspective identify a similar process at work in adult basic education as carried on by the state, particularly the Canada Manpower Training Program. For example, Anthony Berezowecki points out that the interests of the dominant class prevail in the structure and control of the Manpower program:

Rarely are the institutions and staff responsible to their real constituency, the disadvantaged adult, instead, the control rests with persons whose backgrounds and interests greatly differ from those of the disadvantaged. Control and goal-setting are still kept securely out of the hands of the disadvantaged who are being researched and are having things done for and to them .... The way in which the disadvantaged must develop and the goals they must follow are defined in ways which are only familiar to the affluent and which will largely satisfy the needs of the affluent 60

The main objectives are increasing the productivity of the poor and unemployed, i.e. enhancing their value to employers, while extending "social control" over them, i.e. obtaining their acquiesence to their subordinate positions.

For example, Berezowecki argues the "life skills" training component of the Manpower program is inadequate as an anti-poverty strategy because the primary objective is adapt participants to the demands of the job market. 61 Critical examination of what he calls the "root cause" of poverty--the "existing Canadian socio-economic system"--is not included. Obviously, the latter would not be conducive to training "good", i.e. obedient, adaptable, employees. Instead, the programs concentrate on what he calls the "symptoms" of oppression as they are manifested in the lives of clients, e.g. "a negative attitude toward themselves, their self -development and their home and family responsibilities". It is not taken into account that these may actually be "realistic responses to a particularly oppressive situation" faced by the poor in their daily lives, and that to concentrate on changing these symptoms while ignoring their cause only serves to "domesticate" the poor, which Berezowecki defines as "conditioning of the poor to accept their lot".62 In his view: