Being In-itself And Be Normalized

The aim of this study is to examine how children develop their culture in the context of classroom life in a kindergarten. Methods included are daily observations of children's life in the classroom and semi-structured interviews with children and teachers.The study shows that children are developing their culture within the life in the classroom. They develop their culture through discovering and sharing the meanings of the life, which was based on their interests, needs, emotions, value, and etc. They endow inanimate, ordinary, boring things with livingness, magic and joy. They are imbued with the spirits of play which enables them to play at any time and everywhere. They appreciate nature and adventure, and take pleasure in creating and sharing with peer. Through this process, they build a life-world of their own, which enables their own culture grow naturally.However, life in the classroom is organized by teacher and various rules and regulations, which stands for the requirements and control from adult culture. Therefore children have to face such a normalized world, and the living space of their culture is restricted within narrow limits by the time schedule, space organization and other criterions. As the representatives and propagandists of adult culture, teachers emphasize the importance of the rules, safety responsibility, and personal benefits and view children's culture as crazy and try to shape it.Under the stress of adults' rules, children construct their understandings of the rules and obtain some strategies, such as resisting, evading teachers, disguising, and etc. These strategies expand the living space where children's culture develops hardly. However, the learning of these strategies also shows that the saponaceous and hypocritical adult world are influencing the unsophisticated kids .The study concludes that kids need to grow up spontaneously and develop their culture in a nature space.