A nuanced and deeply personal portrait of master educator Robert Reich, The Last Class follows him as he teaches his final course while reflecting on a period of immense personal and global transformation. While Reich is widely known for his public service, most notably as former Secretary of Labor, as well as for his best-selling books and viral social media posts, he has always considered teaching his true calling. After over 40 years and an extraordinary 40,000 students, he is now preparing for his last class. Over the course of the film, Reich confronts the impending finality of this chapter and his own aging with increasing candor, introspection, and, ultimately, emotion. He reveals 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 a deeper look at why inequalities of income and wealth have widened significantly since the late 1970s and why this poses dangerous risks to society. One thousand students fill the biggest lecture hall on the UC Berkeley campus, attending 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 this fight is inspiring. The Last Class is a love letter to education.
