A Study Of Public Kindergarten-depended Parents' Education Demands In The Fringe Area Of Shanghai

The urban-rural fringe area is a special new emergent urban region., with characteristics of a rapid expansion of the total population, diversal population backgrounds, complex relationship among different kinds of residents and a large amout of floating population living together. All these characteristics bring about a great challenge to the local public preshool education. The issue of how to provide a real equal education suitable for all the children from different culture comes up. This study was to provide much more experimental data for resolving this problem through investigating different sources of parents' demands of their children's education..The main research contents includes the following 3 aspects: (1). Investigating the diversal culture backgrounds of the children from public kindergartens in urban-rural fringe,including householde registration, family structure, family income level, parents' occupation, parents' education attainment, children's first language at home,etc; (2) Investigate parents' demands, including parents long-term deamands and their current demands of children's preschool education. The long-term demands includes parents' expectation of children's education attainment, expectation of what personality children will have and what kind of person children will be; Current demands of children's preschool education, including public school entrance admission requirements, education supports needs and demand of school environment, teaching content and teaching patterns; (3) To analyze different demands of parents from different cultural background and to figure out the special needs of special groups and to explore the complicated relation between parents' demands and their different backgounds.The results present a very different cultural backgroud of the public kindergarten children in urban-rural fringe. It also shows that, influened by the diverse backgounds, parents' demands of their children's education is very different , and specil groups have specil needs. In this condition, putting all the children into a regular classroom without careful considerarion of their differnces would unquestionably lead to educaitonal unfairness in all sides. Therefore, this study concludes that it is necessary to turn the current urban culture-oriented education into the multi-cultural education, and to pay more attention to the disadvantaged families and provide more support for them.