Overview
City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media is an educational textbook by the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan, written together with Kathryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan and published in 1977 by the Book Society of Canada. Unlike McLuhan’s better-known theoretical works, this is a pedagogical volume designed for use by students, structured to lead readers through their own investigations rather than to present a finished argument. It represents an attempt to translate McLuhan’s ideas about media, perception, and language into a practical classroom method aimed especially at younger students and general readers.
The book emerged from a collaboration that combined McLuhan’s theoretical apparatus with the classroom experience of Kathryn Hutchon, an educator, and with the editorial and analytical work of Eric McLuhan, Marshall’s son, who worked closely with his father in the last decade of his life and continued to develop and systematize McLuhan’s thought after his death in 1980. The three-way authorship reflects the book’s practical purpose: it was intended to be usable in schools, and its organization reflects concerns about how to teach perception and media awareness to students rather than how to expound a scholarly theory.
Character and Method
The distinctive feature of City as Classroom is its form. Rather than a continuous expository text, it is built around questions, exercises, and “probes”—McLuhan’s characteristic term for open, exploratory prompts meant to provoke observation and inquiry rather than to deliver settled conclusions. The book invites students to treat their everyday environment, and the city around them, as material for study. The premise embedded in the title is that the ordinary surroundings of modern life—advertising, print, broadcasting, speech, the built environment, and the many overlapping media that shape daily experience—constitute a curriculum in themselves, and that students can learn to perceive and analyze these forces directly rather than only through textbooks.
This approach is consistent with McLuhan’s long-held conviction that the effects of media are largely unnoticed by those immersed in them, and that the task of media study is to bring these unconscious environmental effects into conscious awareness. The book accordingly encourages hands-on observation, comparison, and experiment. Students are directed to examine how different media work, how they shape perception and social behavior, and how language and communication technologies structure experience. The emphasis falls on training perception—on getting students to notice the form and effects of a medium rather than merely its content.
A recurring conceptual tool in McLuhan’s thought that informs this kind of exercise is the distinction between “figure” and “ground,” borrowed from Gestalt psychology, in which attention normally fixes on the figure (the content or the object of attention) while ignoring the ground (the surrounding environment or the medium itself). The pedagogical aim of works in this vein is to help students learn to attend to the ground—the hidden environment created by a technology or medium—which McLuhan regarded as the true site of a medium’s transformative power.
Relation to McLuhan’s Wider Work
City as Classroom belongs to the later phase of McLuhan’s career, when he had already become internationally known through works such as The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), and the widely circulated The Medium Is the Massage (1967). Its subtitle, Understanding Language and Media, deliberately echoes the vocabulary of Understanding Media, signaling that the book carries the same broad project into a classroom setting. Where Understanding Media addressed an intellectual and academic readership with an ambitious theoretical framework, City as Classroom takes the essential insights of that framework and recasts them as a practical program of student investigation.
The book is also part of McLuhan’s substantial engagement with education. Throughout his career McLuhan was concerned with the tension between traditional print-based, linear schooling and the electronically shaped sensibilities of students growing up in a world of television, film, and instantaneous communication. He argued that young people arrived in classrooms already shaped by an electronic environment that operated very differently from the sequential, literate order that schools were built to transmit, and that this mismatch produced disengagement. City as Classroom can be read as one attempt to bridge that gap—to make the classroom porous to the media environment outside it and to equip students to study that environment critically.
The collaboration with Eric McLuhan is significant in placing the book within the trajectory that would eventually produce the fuller systematization of McLuhan’s later ideas. Eric McLuhan continued to work on and publish material developed with his father after Marshall’s death, and the working partnership evident in City as Classroom was part of that ongoing effort to consolidate and extend the elder McLuhan’s thought.
Themes and Purpose
The central purpose of the book is media literacy in a broad sense: teaching students to become active, perceptive analysts of the communication environment rather than passive consumers of it. Its themes are those that run throughout McLuhan’s work—the shaping power of media over perception and society, the difference between the content of a medium and its formal effects, the contrast between oral, literate, and electronic modes of communication, and the way language itself functions as a technology that organizes thought and community.
By framing the city and its media as a classroom, the book advances McLuhan’s conviction that genuine understanding of media comes from direct observation of their effects in lived experience. Its exercises are intended to develop habits of attention and inquiry that students could apply to any new medium or technology they encountered. In this sense the book is less concerned with transmitting a body of facts than with cultivating a method of perception—a way of asking what any given medium does to its users and to the wider social and sensory environment.
Significance
City as Classroom occupies a particular niche within McLuhan’s body of work: it is one of the more explicitly practical and pedagogical of his publications, produced in collaboration and intended for use rather than for theoretical debate. As such it has been of interest to educators concerned with media education and to scholars studying McLuhan’s views on teaching and learning, and it stands as evidence of his sustained commitment to the reform of education in an electronic age. It is less widely read than his landmark theoretical books and has not attained the iconic status of Understanding Media or The Medium Is the Massage, but it remains a notable document of McLuhan’s effort to make his ideas usable in the classroom and of his belief that the study of media should begin with the direct, critical observation of the everyday environment that surrounds every student.
