The historic docklands of St. John’s and Halifax, the former factories of Montreal and Toronto, and the vintage warehouses of Winnipeg and Calgary have been transformed into the labs and the offices where the knowledge economy, the learning society are being created. These enormous urban spaces where skilled but, by today’s standards, barely literate stevedores, tradesmen, and teamsters once worked are now occupied by the knowledge workers of the high-tech sector. Sleek, brightly lit computer labs and microprocessors have displaced the massive machines and assembly lines of the last century.

These organizations deal in knowledge, innovation, ingenuity, creativity, and problem solving. The employees are highly educated, young, entrepreneurial, and unconventional. They think for a living.

Yet in all of these cities, within walking distances of these shiny labs and offices, you find dense, poor urban neighbourhoods – the contemporary frontiers.

In the same way the earliest Frontier College teachers turned camps into classrooms more than a hundred years ago, these high-tech labs and offices can be made into learning spaces for those people living in nearby inner-city high-rises. After-school homework programs, reading circles for children, and study circles, at all hours, for adults can be constructed in these places. The employees, people expert and enthusiastic about knowledge and ideas, become the teachers.

In order to organize this kind of new approach for literacy and learning, teachers cannot speak only to other teachers. Because the city is the classroom, teachers must seek solutions to our toughest problems in education, like dropouts and reluctant readers, from everyone in the community.

This is why Frontier College is part of Living Literacies. It is a way for us to continue pursuing that elusive dream of the founder, Fitzpatrick, who so eloquently wrote:

Education must be obtainable on the farm, in the bush, on the railway, and in the mine. We must educate the whole family wherever their work is, wherever they earn their living; teaching them how to earn and at the same time how to grow physically, intellectually, and spiritually to the full stature of their God-given potentialities. This is the real education. This is the place of the true university.