I aim to make the case for grounding curricular practices in our basic state of living. I do not mean to imply that students are not living in the classroom, however. I am suggesting that formal education has the potential to serve a negative or positive function. With the negative, students come to compartmentalize their experiences, i.e., those that happen inside school and those that happen outside. In this case, schooling is a fragmentary aspect of students' lives, and, as a result, it barely penetrates the wall of their existential lining. With the positive, students see formal education as mattering to them in their lives outside of school. This, to me, is the proper function of schooling. When children see this, they can then expand ever-more deeply their capacity to live, their ability to understand themselves, others, and the world. On the one hand, the schooling rhetoric normally does well in making claims of achieving such ends. Yet, when action is our gauge of efficacy, the bureaucratic arrangements of schooling clearly fall short. Furthermore, many educators, including myself, have used terms like relevance or integrated curriculum, which this positive function suggests. Nonetheless, I have seen or heard few educational theories that explicitly define and detail the need to have relevance or integration in accordance with our basic state of living. I will begin to address this need in the ensuing discussions. Martin Heidegger's (1962) Being and Time1 will be the focal point of my current deliberations. To make my interpretations of his work concrete, I will use Ezra Jack Keats' book Peter's Chair (see Appendix). I have used this children's story to teach reading to my first graders and writing to my fourth graders. I will present possible interpretations of the story, and will suggest curricular implications. The Dasein (2) of Peter Peter's Chair (1967) is about a boy named Peter who is learning to adjust to life with a new baby sister. He does not like how his parents, without asking him, took his old crib and high chair, and painted them pink. He and his dog Willie run off with his favorite chair, before that is taken away and painted, too. He eventually discovers that his favorite chair is too small. He then learns that change is okay, and that being a good big brother is a nice new role for him. Being-in-the-world The story begins with Peter building a structure with blocks of different sizes and shapes. He sits his stuffed bear on the middle-level floor, and caps off the structure with his toy alligator. Peter is not thinking about the properties of his blocks or toys. He is simply using them as equipment to build his structure. When Willie the dog suddenly barrages through the structure, which then makes a big crashing sound, Peter's mother calls out, Shhh! You'll have to play more quietly. Remember, we have a new baby in the house. These two scenes show Peter as living in the world with people and things. Heidegger calls this, Being-in-the-world. It is our basic state of existence. It is more primary than the relationship between subjects and objects. All knowing emanates from Being-in-the-world, which means that deliberation and reflection are derivative of this basic existential state. As Heidegger writes: [A] 'commericum' of the subject with a world does not get created for the first time by knowing, nor does it arise from some way in which the world acts upon a subject. Knowing is a mode of Dasein [Being-there] founded upon Being-in-the-world. Thus, Being-in-the-world, as a basic state, must be Interpreted beforehand. (p.90) The hyphens indicate that Being and in-the-world are unified. We can be intelligible only because we live in the meaningful world. The world is the source of our intelligibility, but we give the world its intelligibility. If no Dasein, then no world, and vice versa. Being-in-the-world is holistic, not dichotomous. …