Book excerpt: The publication "Private Learning, Public Needs" looks at the devastating effects neoliberal globalization continues to have on education, schooling, and literacy development in the United States. The book is divided in three parts. Part I "Neoliberal Globalization and the Question of Adult Literacy Education" is broken into two chapers. Chapter one is a study of neoleberalism and its relationship to globalization. Specially, the changing role of the state is examined in terms that bring attention to globalization's capacity to ignore nation-state borders, especially in the context of finance and culture. The role of the state is discussed in light of its influcence on local agencies and on local instiutions. Of issue is the interiorization of neoliberal globalization at the material levels of educaional life, namely curriculum standard and development. Through the imposition of certain kinds of standards, teacher education programs must make some hard decisions about wheter they will, on the one hand, satisfy the needs manufactured by neolibral interests as they manifest themelves in curricular and pedagogic mandates, or, on the other, will use their autority to challenge and confront that which they know is detrimental to democratic principles and good teaching practices. Chapter two examines how neoliberal interests have impeded the goals of adult literacy education. Part II "The Work of Critical Theory in a Neoliberal Age" takes up the work of two prominent cirtical theorists in and beyond education: Erich Fromm and Paulo Freire. Chapter three discusses Fromm's important alternative to top-down discourses of power and authority. In chapter four, Freire's work in Sâo Paulo as Secretry of Education is studied for what it can teach us about the importance an possibility of structural transformations.