In a class society, the power elite necessarily determines what education will be, and therefore its objectives.... it would be supremely naive to imagine that the elite would in any way promote or accept an education which stimulated the oppressed to discover the raison d'etre of the social structure. The most that could be expected is that the elite might permit talk of such education, and occasional experiments which could be immediately suppressed should the status quo be threatened 12 Freire sees great promise in educational projects which go on outside the education system, projects which in his view should be "carried out with the subordinate class in the process of organizing them".13 However, at the same time he does not reject the option of working inside the education system ("that is, strategically outside the system, but tacitly in it"): I have insisted on the impossibility ... of considering the educational system as an instrument of social transformation. At no time, however, did I categorically deny the use of making serious efforts within this system. I underlined the difficulties of such efforts ... but not their uselessness 14 Clearly, Canada is very different from the Third World countries in which Freire has worked. (For example, terms like "liberation", "oppression" and "struggle" are rarely used.) Because of this, the actual nature of the goals and tactics of liberatory education must necessarily be quite different from those developed elsewhere. In fact, Freire insists that the methods and goals of educators must be based on a full recognition of the unique social, political. economic and historical conditions in which they work: The problem encountered by all educators who embark on the path of liberation, at any level ... is that of knowing what to do, how, when, with whom, why, for and against whom... (The) process of liberation, and thus the educational action which must accompany it, varies with respect to methods, strategies and content, not only from one society to another, but also within a single society, in relation to its historical situation. It also varies with respect to the actual power relations existing in society, the level of confronting between classes in the process of liberation 15 Addressing the special conditions In advanced capitalist countries like Canada, Freire states: The liberating effort of education Is one thing In a society where the socio-economic cleavages are clearly visible, where the contradictions are obvious, and the violence of the dominant class on the dominated classes Is crude and primary. It is quite another thing in a highly modernized capitalist society which enjoys a high level of unsocial well-being, where existing contradictions are less easily discernible, and the "manipulation of consciousness" exerts an indisputable influence in masking reality. In the latter case, much more so than in the first, and for obvious reasons, the educational system becomes a highly sophisticated instrument of social control.16