Understanding the women's group as 'sacred' space points to the ways in which the rest of the programme was somehow less satisfying for women. (Wells 1994: 137)

She argues that, in learner-centred literacy programmes:

...women are going to get a better deal if women's groups are offered and are women-driven, that is, women-learner-centred. (Ibid.:139)

The demand to be learner-centred can also limit the introduction of materials which are not mainstream, and also limit the possibility of dialogue between tutor and learner. Being learner-centred has come to imply a neutrality of learning, or that 'the learner should be able to learn whatever she or he wants'. In its crudest form, it suggests that learners should learn what they want to learn, however they want to learn it. In theory this may sound a good thing, but learners' 'wants' may be formed from what they expect to happen in education. They may expect to endlessly learn the alphabet, or redo grade school spelling books, because that is what students are 'supposed' to do in school. Giving students what they want may therefore be preserving the status quo.

It is therefore important to present options for choices, but students cannot make choices if they do not know what the options are. This means that it can be particularly important to offer 'alternative' choices, such as feminism, which are outside the mainstream and are rarely available to people with limited literacy skills. Garber >et al. elaborate on the arguments for introducing a feminist curriculum:

The question we ask ourselves is: is a learner-centred curriculum at odds with a woman-positive or feminist curriculum? We suggest that when learner-centred is interpreted to mean the learner simply selecting the curriculum, with little or no input from the tutor or facilitator to broaden options and possibilities, then woman-positive and learner-centred are at odds. A woman-positive education has content, has a point of view. But, learner-centred education has, as we have seen, content or point of view, too. Unfortunately that content is usually the content of the mainstream thought because it is most pervasive and is not labelled (eg. 'the white, middle-class, male perspective') and is therefore seen as neutral, unbiased and true. But mainstream thought does have a bias and that bias is neither woman-positive nor feminist. When we seek to do simply what the learner 'wants' we are ignoring the powerful influences of mainstream thought and our own role, which inevitably shape the 'choices' a learner makes.

These ideas are not new. They are embedded in another important guiding principle in literacy: 'no education is neutral'. Hiding behind an unbiased conception of learner-centred can be a way to forget this other principle. We hear people saying 'you cannot impose a feminist agenda, you cannot impose a feminist curriculum on learners because this is not learner-centred.' And indeed we cannot impose it. But, as feminists, it is more in keeping with a rich interpretation of learner-centred (which keeps in mind that no education is neutral) to recognize our interests, to call them out and make them explicit. A woman-positive approach and content should be put out there, for learners to challenge. If we pretend to give learners what they want without recognizing what we want, what our goals are, we are not being true to the heart of learner-centred programming. If we recognize learners as adults we will be prepared to dialogue with them and acknowledge our own viewpoints. We will recognize that we cannot teach the skills of literacy devoid of content. All choice of content is political. To exclude a feminist agenda is just as political as to include it. (1991: p.11).