Bruce effectively and conclusively challenges anyone interested in the future of public education to imagine education existing both within the walls of a classroom and beyond, extending even to communities and workplaces. Arguing that connecting classroom learning to daily life is imperative, Bruce notes that this practice predates modern educational systems. To achieve fully wholistic education today, educational systems must work to expand the boundaries of learning. Engaging with a community and its resources, for instance, can lead to richer educational experiences. The author profiles educators who have experience with alternative schooling and provides examples of how educational efforts can be carried out more humanely and responsibly to help change the current school system. Overall, Bruce clearly details how schooling can and should connect classroom learning and daily life, drawing on examples such as online learning, community schools, communiversities, and learning through work. Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.

Choice Reviews

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.

Ching-Chiu Lin, Simon Fraser University

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.

Maureen Hogan, PhD, teacher, and scholar

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.

Martin Wolske, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois

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.

Wojciech Malecki, Associate Professor of Literary Theory, University of Wroclaw, the author of Human Minds and Animal Stories

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.

Brian Drayton, Co-Director, Center for School Reform, TERC, Cambridge, Massachusetts