An existential perspective on curricular relevance.

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An existential perspective on curricular relevance.

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 m...

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