Beyond the Classroom Walls

The book asks readers to adopt a critical and comprehensive view of education (pre-K to lifelong learning) as existing both within classroom walls, and in the surrounding world, including communities and workplaces. It presents an integrated view of online learning, community schools, communiversities, and learning through work. Our educational systems are organized in ways that make this integration difficult. We have elaborate systems of formal instruction––academies, schools, universities, and training institutes––all to facilitate learning within the walls. At the same time we have ample opportunities for learning in the wild. Unfortunately these systems diverge to the point that they do little to support learning that allows us to draw from both of the realms of knowledge. But it is possible to bring together learning within the walls with that beyond the walls. Moreover it is crucial to make these connections in the world of today. In order to bring together the classroom and daily life we need an educational system that does that as well.The book provides a coherent account of how schooling can and should relate to learning beyond the classroom walls.

Bruce's reflective and reflexive engagement of a life-long inquiry into education and living is an invaluable lesson for educators working with learners of tomorrow. , If all waste is due to isolation, as John Dewey warned in The School and Society in 1899, then all growth is due to connection. In his new book on the communiversity as the future of education, Chip Bruce argues—with great erudition, historical sweep, and cross-cultural examples—that the future of education should be one where the community is the curriculum, and where knowledge is negotiated through transactive communication in order to solve everyday problems. In this schemata, mind and body are connected and conceptual and practical knowledge are mutually informed, organic, rhizomatic and continually reformed and renegotiated through community practice, both within the four walls of a classroom and outside in the community. The waste comes from our binary assumptions about schooling and life, that they are separate, and that one kind of knowledge is superior to another. In fact, schooling and life are co-constituitive, and education is most powerful (democratic, nurturing, inspiring, meaningful and socially just) when understood and practiced that way. , By the end of Part I of the book, I was certain Bruce provided us with an essential textbook countering the stock transmission and interaction modes of teaching and engagement. But chapter by chapter I found myself traveling through an essential reframing of education itself using the critical transactional mode of communication to facilitate transformative collaborations between formal learning institutions and community. Only through such connected cycles of action and reflection can we truly advance the long moral arc of the educational universe towards social justice in body and mind together., The world today is divided into those who claim that we need more education and those who claim that we do not any as it has become completely useless. Bertram C. Bruce’s The Classroom and Daily Life answers both these claims with one single idea, of education that abolishes the distinction between practice and theory and breaks down the walls separating the classroom from everyday experience. Lucidly written and unfailingly illuminating, the book practices what it preaches, profitably synthesizing the most abstract of philosophical ideas with concrete examples of trailblazing educational initiatives from across different continents, communities, and cultures. , This is a book that I will recommend widely amongst my acquaintance, including educators, community activists, and others engaged in the renewal of society. People will be inspired to see that the conception "that education should be diffused in a social atmosphere, that community members set the terms for learning, and that intellectual life starts with the community" is not only a matter of utopian vision, but an actual, concrete reality in all kinds of settings around the world. The narrative weaves Bruce’s own long career of educational experimentation, and unobtrusively makes deft use of an extraordinary range of philosophical resources.

Bertram C. Bruce is currently a Professor Emeritus in Information Sciences at the University of Illinois. His work contributes to a tradition of democratic education, asking “How can we guide the educational enterprise by an ethical vision, not simply a technocratic one of transmitting isolated facts and skills?” His career combines a philosophical perspective with passionate work directly with communities in the US and many other countries throughout the world.