Analysis and Suggestions on CRISIS Education in South KOREAN Elementary School

An elementary school is a place where a group of youths with lively physical activities are active and are always exposed to the risks of accident, therefore, it is required for the elementary school students who are lacking in the ability, knowledge and judgment in crisis responses to have crisis education. The crisis situation for South Korean children and adolescents is very high among OECD countries with an average of 25.6 deaths in children and adolescents in the past between 1991 and 1995. From 2009 to 2010, the mortality rate of per 100,000 children and adolescents was 9.7 persons (traffic accident), 7.1 persons (murder), 5.1 persons (suicide), 1.8 persons (drowning), 1.7 persons (falls), 0.5 persons (fire accident), and 0.1 persons (poisoning accidents). Crisis Education in South Korean Elementary School is supporting disaster control, life safety, traffic safety, violence and personal safety, drug and harmful material safety, internet addiction and first aid in relation to safety related matters by greatly increasing the safety budget in 2016. However, the safety education conducted at South Korean elementary schools is often insufficient for students to make them cope with and overcome crises. Even if elementary schools have to carry out every year over 44 hours of safety education such as six hours of disaster preparedness education, missing and abducted person prevention and traffic safety, they are replaced with only 2 ~ 6 hours of disaster training for the reason that there is no specific guidance. As a result of the ‘Survey on Children’s Safety Education’ conducted from October to November last year by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Security Administration and so on in terms of 21,540 teachers from nationwide kindergartens and elementary schools, 12.9% of elementary school teachers and 30,6% of kindergartens teachers observed the mandatory time for safety education, however, most of them have been replaced by audiovisual materials, and only 18.1% of elementary school teachers and 28.1% of kinder-garten teachers had participatory education. The participatory method for the safety education for elementary school students, based on the assumption of an actual emergency situation, was more effective, however, most of delivering methods were to render the relevant content as lectures. Therefore, the crisis education for elementary school in South Korea needs to be systematically developed as follows. 1) It is necessary to conduct participatory education on the contents and the method of crisis education at schools. 2) It is necessary to expand the professional workforce in charge of crisis education at schools. 3) It is necessary to learn crisis education by experience in order to act it out in case of a crisis by implementing crisis education periodically by systemizing it according to the levels of students. 4) It is necessary to provide various crisis response experience sites. Therefore, this study aimed to be helpful in keeping oneself from dangers by learning personal methods of crisis management response and ability by the opening of crisis education curriculum so that students may un-derstand proper crisis management and learn proper responsibility through the curriculum of South Korean ele-mentary school.