Because of their economic vulnerability and victimization by employers, many members of the surplus population share acute needs for special social and educational services, including literacy training and academic upgrading. They form the main potential constituency for ABE, literacy and English language programs. For example, in an article on an English class conducted in a garment factory in Toronto, the authors state that the participants, immigrant women, are "the most marginalized of an already-exploited cheap labour force". The article points out that they are especially vulnerable because they cannot speak the language of the workplace.36 Similarly, in the report of a Toronto community education project with immigrants who are "marginal workers" employed in service occupations in buildings, hotels and restaurants and in small, labour-intensive manufacturing companies it is pointed out that participants suffer from lack of unions, low wages and poor job conditions. Their situation is one of insecurity and powerlessness. Because they can neither speak nor read and write in English, theirs is a "blind and deaf" reality, full of "problems, needs, pain". The report notes that it is not just an "immigrant problem"--the low-income Canadian-born working class community "face the same problems and confront the same social reality in similar ways as the immigrants".37 Finally, Serge Wagner refers to the Quebecois low-income working class community in Montreal in which he conducted his literacy program as "an area of worker exploitation", supplying "cheap labour" for the economy 38

These examples confirm Freire's observation that "in the general context of class society, illiterates are treated as chattel, as oppressed individuals who are refused the right of existence .... 39 However, in the view of adherents of the critical perspective, illiteracy is itself not the key variable--it is just one aspect of a much larger problem. According to the Toronto-based Literacy Working Group:

we need more than to be literate to cope with our reality in order to develop our lives as human beings capable of mastering our own history, not being passive and oppressed pieces of an economic and political system that condemns us to poverty and exploitation. In such a context the skills of reading, writing and basic math are just the skills needed to function as labourers, an anonymous material to be exploited: politically, economically and socially 40

The source of the oppressed state of those who we have termed the surplus population does not lie in a lack of literacy skills (or in a lack of job skills, life skills, etc.). Instead, according to the Literacy Working Group, the source is the "conflictive and oppressive ... social, political and economic context...."41

The Role of Institutionalized Education

On the basis of arguments and evidence such as have been presented, adherents of the critical perspective hold that as important as upgrading and training opportunities are for members of the surplus population, they can only serve as a palliative with regard to the problem of poverty--i.e. a means of treating its symptoms. They would insist that no mere quantitative increase in education and training can significantly reduce poverty because education does not touch what Berezowecki calls the "root causes" of poverty, located at the heart of the prevailing economic structure.