ABSTRACT
This chapter studies the principal contributions of Ernesto Guevara to understanding of the role of education in revolutionary struggles. His passion for travel and reading, and his habit of systematising his own experiences, lead us to understand him as an autodidact. Exploring his diaries, his writings and his speeches on education – the latter in revolutionary Cuba – allows us to see why he understood that education was of secondary importance during the struggle for liberation; and why this assessment changes diametrically in the phase of revolutionary construction, i.e. after the war of liberation is won. This discussion is reinforced by a review of the principal challenges facing education as the means of forming the “new man”.
