Summary

This brief, and by no means comprehensive examination of recent reports and recommendations generated from within the adult education profession, particularly by adult basic educators, is sufficient to suggest that while the critical perspective has some limited influence, the liberal perspective remains the dominant outlook. Little reevaluation of the liberal perspective appears to have been undertaken by Canadian adult educators in light of the serious criticisms which have been made of it and the programs based upon it, particularly as based on the evidence from the manpower training and upgrading programs conducted in the U.S. and Canada. The liberal perspective continues to represent a vehicle for adult basic educators who seek to hold a 'neutral' political stance, i.e. who attempt to simultaneously speak both to the needs of the dominant classes for productivity and economic growth and to the needs of impoverished and illiterate members of the Canadian working class for collective political social and economic liberation. However, from the point of view of the critical perspective, this attempted neutrality can only be viewed as an illusion involving considerable costs. An observation by Freire highlights this:

What seems fundamental to me is the clear-cut position which the teachers must assume in relation to the political option; this implies values and principles, a position with respect to the "possible dream that is to be accomplished .... for example, if a teacher opts for capitalist modernization, then adult literacy programs cannot go beyond, on the one hand, enabling persons to read texts with no regard to content, and on the other, increasing their chances of selling their labour on what is not accidentally called the "Job market". If the teacher opts for another solution, then the essential task of the literacy program is to help illiterates to discover the importance not of being able to read alienated or alienating story but of making history. while being fashioned by it.31

For adult basic educators In Canada to continue to represent literacy as a solution to the problems of poverty and unemployment seems to me to continue to opt for "capitalist modernization", to choose (whether Intentionally or not) the interests of the dominant, i.e. capitalist, class In the domestication and adaptation of illiterate adults to the class structure.