ABSTRACT
Adult literacy programmes in the Third World are widely regarded as promoting equality by extending educational opportunity to sections of the population who have failed to benefit from school education. However, the question of adult literacy in the capitalist countries of the Third World needs to be reconsidered in the context of the relationship of the state to the inequalities in the wider society. In this chapter I suggest that literacy programmes tend to reproduce class, ethnic, and gender inequalities and serve to legitimate the unequal social order, which the state seeks to uphold.
