Creating Play Atmosphere and Time for Children in Chinese Kindergarten: Difficulties and Reflection

Schools’ busy situation is far away from its Greek root “Scholé” that means leisure time compared with political duty and war at that era which is also similar in ancient China. From the leisure point of view, school should be relax and free for young children in kindergarten. This means that play should take the most time on the schedule. Unfortunately, Political class skillfully disseminating serious competition among nations to deliver anxiety on young generations’ education to the public,which makes parents and school system highly valued formal learning much more than play. Chinese kindergarten may be have the longest formal learning time due to its history emphasis on learning from the model. Endure hardship as the basic habit from the younger children for the nature of life is full of hardship in Chinese philosophy. These underpinned ideas encounter great challenges from the Western early childhood education which puts more emphasis on play. Play is conceived as children’s life itself, in which integrated learning can happen and is much more suitable and abundant for young children than formal learning. Although Chinese Educational Ministry promulgated kindergarten work regulation and educational guideline to make play as the basic activity in 1996 and 2001,there are still lots of factors that impede kindergartens implement play in practice. Lack of free time in kindergarten both on schedule and in fact is the obvious sign. This paper wants to reflect those factors in cultural perspective and try to use variety meanings of time especially subjective time to analysis the practice on reconstructing kindergartens’ play atmosphere and time, and the findings on creating different inter-subjective time for young children.