The great merit of this approach is that it allows those working for basic education and literacy opportunities to bypass having to convince political and economic elites of the economic benefits of literacy as the primary reason for supporting them. Instead, it allows them to concentrate on communicating the fact that Canadian society denies full participation to a small but significant segment of its population. However, even if this approach does not rely on the economic argument of the liberal perspective, it does not in itself replace it. That is, to argue that adults have a right to basic education says nothing about what the nature of these opportunities should be. It could as easily be used to refer to programs based on the liberal 'deficiency-remediation' approach as ones influenced by the critical 'oppression-liberation' perspective. Moreover, one can imagine that even if a province were to legislate and fund a system of adult basic education, it might rule that neither the liberal nor the critical perspectives are appropriate, and opt instead for a carbon copy of the youth education system, only slightly modified for adults. The point is that the struggle over the proper perspective on illiteracy is not resolved when and if basic education for adults is accepted as a right; it is simply displaced from the halls of the provincial parliament--where such a law is passed--to the sites where the new system of ABE is taking shape, including the classes, programs, communities, and the government ministry which is responsible for implementing it. Here the struggle goes on over the nature of the opportunities to be offered.

Papers

For example, two recent provincial government discussion papers with which adult educators have been associated uncritically cite the hypothesis of a direct causal link between illiteracy and poverty as their central argument for developing new systems of adult basic education. Neither paper acknowledges the substantial criticisms which have been made of this perspective. One is the Report of the Committee of Adult Basic Education, a document prepared under the chairmanship of an adult educator working with the Division of Continuing Education in the Government of British Columbia Ministry of Education. It states:

The social and economic costs of low educational attainment are high. Most adult functional illiterates are among the working poor, and many are unemployed .... similarly, relatively high proportions of those on welfare are functionally illiterate.6