Madison Teachers Inc. & The Progressive Present:

The Last Class

with Robert Reich

October 19 @ 7:00 pm

** Tickets will be available for purchase tonight at the box office **

Synopsis

The Last Class is a nuanced and deeply personal portrait of master educator Robert Reich teaching his final course and reflecting on a period of immense transformation, personally and globally. It is a love letter to education. The former Secretary of Labor might be famous for his public service, best-selling books, and viral social media posts, but he always considered teaching his true calling. Now, after over 40 years and an extraordinary 40,000 students, Reich is preparing for his last class. 

Over the course of the film, Reich confronts the impending finality, and his own aging, with increasing candor, introspection, and, ultimately, emotion. He displays a rawness of feeling he has never shared publicly before. Drawing on his lifetime in politics, he uses his class, “Wealth and Poverty,” to offer us all a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s, and why this poses dangerous risks to our society. 

One thousand students fill the biggest lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, the last class to receive Reich’s wisdom and exhortations not to accept that the world has to stay the way it is. His belief in the next generation’s ability to take on the fight is inspiring.

Director’s Statement

I refuse to believe what I hear: that film is a dying medium, that young people have no attention spans, that cynicism is ascendent, and that the wisdom of the past is being forgotten. And after documenting Robert Reich’s last class, after his more than 40years of teaching, I am filled with hope. I have always been impressed by Reich the public figure—his clarity of vision, his commitment to the common good, and his basic decency. But when I met him a few years back, I was struck by qualities of his personality I had never seen before. I saw a person courageously confronting his own aging amid a world in crisis. Most of all I saw a teacher—a master of the craft who was engaging, passionate, and inspiring. 

When I learned he was retiring from teaching his immensely popular class at UC Berkeley, I knew this was a man and a moment that needed to be captured. I didn’t yet know what the material would become, but Reich is a uniquely perceptive observer, who brings a deep reservoir of experience and insight to our troubled times. As he passes the torch to his students, he balances deep empathy with high expectations; his time to lead is ending, and it is they who must mend what is broken.

In many ways, The Last Classcould be considered a “small film”—a portrait of one man over a brief span of time in a single college town. But its themes and messages resist easy definition—much like Reich himself. I come from a family of educators, and this film invites us both to bestudents and teachers, rising to Reich’s challenge to play our part in helping better the world.

–Elliot Kirschner, April 2025