Analysis and Suggestions on University Curriculums in KOREA for Individual CRISIS Management

Abstract

We face numerous incidents/accidents through the mass media on a daily basis. In fact, those inci-dents/accidents often hurt the body and the soul and sometimes it even takes one’s life away. Such “crisis” has become one of the unavoidable elements of our daily lives. Moreover, individuals and/or organizations must make choices which bear crisis to a certain extent to achieve their goal. However, in order for organizations and/or individuals to effectively stand with crisis, crisis management techniques must be well-defined. The crisis management of an individual is a technique to protect the body and the mind such as self-defense which does not only manage the external crisis and physical forces but also manage the internal self to lead a healthy and wholesome life. Nonetheless, self-defense often is limited to dealing with physical violence only. It represents not only protecting and preventing oneself form physical forces including verbal, psychological, sexual and economic violence but also from the various crisis exposed to the self as the life conditions and natural condi-tions are changing. Especially, using self-defense, as a means for individual crisis management, can worsen the situation depend-ing on the circumstances. Therefore, based on the stream of time, at present time, it is necessary for universities to establish a curriculum for individual crisis management to offer systematic education to enhance self-management skill and to help cope with various natural and living environmental crisis and many types of vio-lence by understanding and learning crisis management techniques for individuals. This study is based on the results from analyzing the courses offered till the 2013 curriculum reform as the 3 credits from theory and the 'understanding of the principles of self-defense' as the 2004 liberal art course By the three steps of self-defense 1. By dividing the surrounding vigilance into vigilances for people, object and natural environment, escaping ability which varies depending on the surrounding can be understood and one can act in a calm and collected manner even in the worst situations. 2. As there are five senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste as well as spiritual and psychological intui-tions in a human body, a situation can be carefully judged based on the information gained from the surround-ing vigilance. 3. Taking actions is a step to take measures based on the decision made after judging the situation and its goal should be set to safety-first. In particular, as the only course for individual crisis management, it has increased the students’ ability to man-age crisis of each individual. As there cannot be more than 36 credits per semester in universities and students can only take up to 18 to 21 credits, systematic education for individual crisis management is virtually nonexistent. Consequently, as the result from this study, university curriculums must offer courses for proper understanding of crisis management and learning about suitable actions to take. It is hoped that the individual crisis manage-ment skill attained through this study to help protect oneself by controlling one’s emotion when dealing with crisis from people, object and/or the natural environment and also by familiarizing the laws and techniques to mentally and physically cope with such crisis.