most adult basic education programs optimistically assume that the problems can be overcome simply by educating the disadvantaged and modifying their behavior in socially desirable ways. Thus society's interests are safeguarded and there is no threat to the status quo. The present order, priorities and structures of Canawan society need not be altered; only the disadvantaged need be altered 63

Similarly, Serge Wagner found through his experience with literacy education in Montreal that literacy texts and materials for adults in common use are:

tracts to train and domesticate the working class ... to fit into the capitalist system .... When you realize that these texts are edited for society's rejects, you cannot help being thoroughly disheartened by the resignation and docility that is being preached to them 64

Like youth education, adult basic education and literacy training based on the liberal "adaptation" model serves to socially "reproduce" among the surplus population stratum of the working class the attitudes, values and. personality characteristics appropriate for their on-going role as cheap labour in the economy. In this way, Institutionalized adult basic education helps to perpetuate inequality rather than contribute to its transformation.

In spite of the serious flaws in the "adaptive" or "remediation" strategy of mainstream liberal ABE and literacy programs, adherents of the critical perspective do not advocate dismantling them or of abandoning attempts 'to extend institutionalized adult basic education opportunities to the poor. In Wagner's view:

it is obvious that literacy training solves basic needs: learning how to read and write in a literate society like ours is not a luxury 65

Hautecoeur believes that while existing institutional literacy programs are inadequate:

One must recognize nevertheless that all means of quantitative and qualitative development in providing schools or scholastic elimination of illiteracy are to be favored, encouraged and increased 66

What adherents of the critical perspective do insist, however, is that in view of the failure of the liberal perspective as a theoretical and practical guide for adult literacy and basic education, a quite different, libratory, education approach must be developed and implemented. It must embody what Freire calls a "clear perception of the dynamic relations between society and education".. 67 In the following chapter, the nature of libratory adult basic education will be explored, particularly with reference to Canada.