The various classes, courses and workshops offered by the project became settings for staff members to work with members of the community to examine "the systems which control us and keep us powerless", and to take steps toward common action. These actions have included analyzing union contracts, deciding to form a cooperative, protesting the building of a high-rise building in a residential area, and asking City Hall to build a new community centre. 21

Analysis

A major theme running through both of these accounts of programs based on the critical perspective on illiteracy is the on-going attempt to forge an education practice which more effectively serves the needs of participants in a collective sense, i.e. not as isolated "disadvantaged" adults, but as particularly oppressed members of the working class and as residents of the working class communities in which they live. In both cases this involved the attempt to develop education as a means of support for collective analysis and action as part of actual, on-going working class struggles around problems of food, housing, and union and community life. The accounts make clear that the development of educational practice along the lines of the critical perspective requires a growing sophistication in political economy analysis of the concrete conditions in which one works and the larger context in which they are embedded. It is necessary to be aware of the class position of the. participants, their associated consciousness, the nature of one's own class position, the nature of the power structure at the local and national levels, the nature of on-going class struggles, and many other similar factors.

Toward a Theory of the Macro-Context

The foregoing accounts of radical literacy education projects, and others. like them in the literature on Canadian adult basic education, represent examples of the development of the erotical aspect of the critical perspective. However, accounts of practice at this level, i.e. the community, are limited in their scope. They concentrate on the micro-context of the program, and to some degree the interaction between the micro-context and the macro-context of the larger political economic structures in which the program is embedded, but they do not extend to consideration of the macro-context in its widest sense--where it has been argued that Freire's writings are weakest-i.e. the relationship of illiteracy to class and poverty. Yet this is the level at which questions like political strategies for the development of literacy education in Canada can be addressed--the questions which most insistently demand answers at the present time.

In the following three chapters, I attempt to make several brief contributions to the strengthening of the broader political economic basis of the critical perspective. First, I compare the liberal and critical perspectives in terms of their capacity to explain the role of illiteracy in the dynamics of poverty and class inequality in Canada. I feel that this is a central task at the present time in view of the fact that while many adult basic educators are sincerely attracted to a critical perspective, they have difficulty in 'grounding' it in the complex and sophisticated political economic context of Canadian society, and so continue to hold liberal assumptions (even if not uncritically).