ABSTRACT
For over two decades I have worked in the related fields of political education and educational reform. In educational reform I have been most engaged with the alternative movement, and most challenged by the insights and provocations of Ivan Illich. In political education I have been most influenced and challenged by Bernard Crick, with whom I tried to elaborate a concept of ‘political literacy’ (Crick and Lister 1978:37-46), and by Paulo Freire, whose work I first met in the 1970s in the samizdat manuscripts of the radicalized Student Christian Movement (which had become more concerned about the Third World than about the next world).
