CHAPTER 7

FREIRE AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

The Critical Perspective and ABE Professionals

What the further implications of the critical perspective might be for actions to advance the development of adult literacy and basic education opportunities in Canada are not clear. No actual movement or large-scale organization presently embodies it as part of its working assumptions. Even more fundamentally, the critical perspective is not well developed in a theoretical sense in Canada at the present time and so does not easily lend itself to operationalization in concrete approaches. The present chapter examines the reasons for this and points out the implications for efforts to elaborate it and extend its influence.

Theoretical Underdevelopment

The critical perspective is a powerful and suggestive body of thought, but it is at the same time diverse and fragmentary. It is expressed for the most part either in isolated accounts of literacy and basic education programs in which the relationship of the localized practice to the broader social and political context of Canada is alluded to but not extensively analyzed, or in attacks on. the dominant liberal perspective which do not traverse far beyond a critique toward an alternative theoretical framework. It is clearly only emerging as a perspective at the present time.

This is in sharp contrast to the liberal perspective, which has engaged the attention of corps of researchers from government and academia over a number of years, and which is for this reason extensively developed and widely understood, even among laymen. Of course, this gap in the relative development of the two perspectives is not accidental. The lack of theoretical development of the critical perspective in Canada is related in a dialectical way to the continuing marginality of radical adult basic education practice here. Unlike educational practice based on the liberal perspective, programs inspired by the critical perspective represent a threat to the existing distribution of wealth power and status in Canada and so provoke fear and resistance on the part of powerful elites, among them those who D'Arcy Martin calls the "technocrats who control North American education".1 Without support and funding for radical projects, Canadian adult basic educators have not been able to develop the critical perspective much beyond Freire's own seminal contribution. This is in marked contrast to the situation in post-revolutionary societies like Cuba and Nicaragua where popular initiatives in literacy education under the direction and sponsorship of progressive governments have scored major successes, thereby generating a wealth of experience and data for the advancement of theory and practice pertaining to their national conditions.