Our approach is to see the strengths and the intelligence that exist in these places in the same way the founders did more than a century ago.

The founders met loggers eager to study agriculture; we meet cab drivers eager to study literature. They turned log cabins into classrooms; we set up homework clubs for inner-city students in the MuchMusic studios. Fitzpatrick proved that every place is a learning place and that people can learn everywhere. What does that mean for today’s Canada? How can we apply the same ingenuity that devised reading tents and teachers on horseback – another nineteenth-century Frontier invention – in order to teach workers in suburban strip malls?

Frontier College is a part of Living Literacies in order to get help in answering these questions. We want to expand the conversation about education. Teachers and literacy groups, ourselves included, see things in a certain way. But when you involve inventors, philosophers, authors, musicians, and poets in the conversation, you will get different responses. Our long partnership with the Chum-City group, for example, began almost 20 years ago when I asked Daniel Richler, then a MuchMusic VJ, about the link between rock music and literacy. Daniel took me with him on a visit to a suburban high school where he talked with the students about the references to Greek myths and Beat literature in contemporary music. That led to the first“Rock’ n’Roll’n’Reading” video, broadcast nationally over MuchMusic, and a series of projects in support of turning teens on to the power of knowledge and ideas through the use of music and popular culture.

It is commonplace to note that we live in the knowledge and information age. But schools and teachers must acknowledge that one consequence of this is that, more than ever before, learning and teaching cannot be restricted to the conventional classroom.

In 1976, Marshall McLuhan wrote:

Most people in the community work mainly at exchanging knowledge and information with one another. This activity does not diVer from the work done in schools. The work of the community has become a continuation of the work done in school; school work has become part of the work of the community. Since all the answers are available outside the classroom, it is a good strategy to put the questions outside the classroom. The city is the classroom!