Epilogue: Living Revolution, Learning Revolution, Teaching Revolution

Abstract

After many iterations, the title of this book became, based on a suggestion from our series editor Tony Green, Educating from Marx: Race, Gender, and Learning. It is a simple and astute title through which Tony inadvertently returned us to the roots of this project. In the fall of 2006 a reading group began in the adult education and community development program at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. We came together for various reasons, the first of which was to read original texts by theorists of influence in the field of adult education. Marx, and those who followed after him, came to the forefront of this discussion given our interest in the critical/radical tradition of the field. Over time, the group coalesced around a central problematic: how to formulate a theoretical framework, drawing on anti-racism, postcolonial studies, feminism, and dialectical historical materialism, through which we could better understand the particular historical moment in which we live. We have asked ourselves a deceptively simple, but not simplistic, question that has guided our work: if we look through this framework, what do we see? At the conclusion of this exploration, we have to turn to another of these “easier said than done” propositions: how do we teach it?