The purpose of this study is to analyze the actual state and problems of Buddhist nurseries and those who work for the nursery, and then to look for the ways to encourage the early-child-care and to develope the nursery system. More concretely speakin...
The purpose of this study is to analyze the actual state and problems of Buddhist nurseries and those who work for the nursery, and then to look for the ways to encourage the early-child-care and to develope the nursery system. More concretely speaking, this study can be distinguished into following three.
1. A Study on the actual state and problems Buddhist nurseries have. The analytic categories are this four: object of nursery, content of nursery, nursery administration, and finance.
2. Analysis and comparison of what those who are in charge of nurseries think about the above four items. Here, several propeties of them, such as region, career, and qualification, and the form of nursery(public or private), are considered as important variations.
3. Based on the result of the above study, the ways to encourage and enhance the Buddhist early-child-care will be sought by items: object of nursery, content of nursery, nursery administration, and finance.
For this study, some records and documents were referred to, and at the same time, a questionnaire was made up. As for records and documents, I depended on several different sources: the "Index of the childcaring business in 1988" projected by the Ministry of Health & Welfare, the revised law of childcare, some periodicals published by the Social Welfare Fund in Jogye Order, and many other academic materials and periodicals about the Buddhist nurseries.
And in order to investigate the actual state of Buddhist nursery institutions, I gave phone calls to each nursery, or visited to make up questions. By analyzing the result of the questions, I found some problems in the nursery systems.
Questioning and analysis were based on the analytic framework developed by N. Gilbert & H. Specht, which has four dimensions: Allocation, Provision, Delivery, and Finance, and according to which I chose four sub-categories: object of nursery, content of nursery, nursery administration, and finance, through which the data were analyzed and evaluated. Its result is as follows.
First, Buddhist nursery institutions are excessively concentrated in big cities such as Seoul, Pusan, and Kyong-Ki region. Besides, most of them are public nurseries, so they heavily depend on subsidies from the government. And almost all of them suffer from the financial problems.
Second, it seems to be necessary to developed more effective educational programs for parents and nursing curriculum. And this new program should include the idea of Buddhist childcaring materials to each nursery.
Third, most of the staff in nurseries point out that a great number of administrative forms and documents are too much in number and too complicated to carry out. Futhermore, those who are in charge of administration, according to the survey, don't have much specialty. To fix such a problem, therefore, it is desirable to establish the "Department of Buddhist Childcare" in Jogye Order and "Buddhist Research Institute for Childcare" in Dongguk University.
And lastly, the present caring-cost per early child appropriated by the government is too low to run nursery, so most buddhist nurseries have financial problems. Accordingly, more positive financial supports are required, from not just the government but also consigners.