Three competencies, and the years the essay places

In the early 2000s, Korea’s Ministry of Education once ran a training course for elderly-education specialists. If such a course were run again, this essay names three competencies to raise: designing programs, field practice, and counseling. Since 1960, national income rose quickly, and longer lives followed medicine and hygiene. Average life expectancy is placed at 52.4 years in 1960 and 66.1 in 1988. People aged 65 and over are placed at 825,000 in 1960, 2,144,000 in 1990, and, in a 2009 recount, 5,267,000, or 10.6 percent of the population then. From the 1980s, a policy that urged fewer births is also placed as having left a large older generation to age in place. As of 2021, the essay treats the difficulties of later life as a serious social problem. The long COVID-19 period, left as it is placed here, made isolation worse, as senior centers and offline programs fell away.

Programs should keep pace with a street that changes quickly — even ordering a meal may now mean a kiosk — and the specialist should turn a change into something usable, such as kiosk lessons or traffic safety for older drivers. Field practice is illustrated by Bak Mak-rye’s YouTube channel, Korea Grandma. Early films show a grandmother who snaps at her granddaughter Kim Yu-ra and lacks confidence; later she tells her viewers she loves them, shops at The Hyundai Seoul, and enjoys the camera. She began after a hospital warning about dementia; her experience became the channel’s material. As of May 2021, it is placed at 1.31 million subscribers. Counseling is needed as households shrink and, in 2009, the sex ratio among older people is placed at about 1 to 1.3, with many living alone after a spouse’s death. In the long COVID-19 period, two generations under one roof could strain a home. More people able to counsel online and in person are needed, with a welcoming stance that helps and does not steer.

Life begins at 70, and reminiscence

To ask the living to think about death can seem cruel, yet understanding death, the essay says, helps a life be lived well. Hayama Amari’s 2012 autobiographical essay On my twenty-ninth birthday, I decided to die in a year is cited: a self-set one-year limit brought not despair but the courage to live. Korea’s death-preparation education is still thin, because the society does not much like to talk about dying. The writer designs a remote course, Life begins at 70, for people aged 70 and over, so that facing death can wake a life’s aims again. People already prepare, sometimes with a memorial portrait, but often in secret or with unease. Five sixty-minute sessions, once a week on Zoom, run from understanding life and death, through finding oneself — including an MBTI inventory, a life review, and forgiveness — and conversation with others, to legal preparation, a dignified death, a will, and a funeral video letter.

For counseling, the writer chooses reminiscence, often in the oral form, listening closely so that rich memory can work as a therapeutic element. Past success can light a present problem, and a sense of efficacy can rise. When regret is heavy, a low mood may rise; immediate support can then give courage. This page stays with the 1960, 1988, 1990, and 2009 figures as they are placed, and with the May 2021 subscriber count, and does not add later official specialist headcounts or later official population tallies. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. In the early 2000s, Korea’s Ministry of Education once ran a training course for elderly-education specialists. If such a course were run again, the essay asks which competencies should be raised in the people who take part, and it selects three and gives a reason for each. Since 1960, the level of national income rose quickly. With advances in medicine and improvements in hygiene, Korea is placed among the countries whose average life lengthened at a strikingly fast pace, and the older population grew. From the 1980s, a birth-control policy that sought to stop unrestrained births, in the spirit of having fewer children and living well, is also placed as having left an already large older generation to become elderly, so the older population grew quickly. In 1960, average life expectancy was 52.4 years; in 1988 it was 66.1, a rise of nearly fifteen years. People aged 65 and over are placed at only 825,000 in 1960 and at 2,144,000 in 1990, about 2.3 times as many, then five percent of the whole population. A 2009 recount places people aged 65 and over at 5,267,000, 10.6 percent of the population at that time. Korean society had become an aging society, and the difficulties of later life had become a reality. Those difficulties are not only a matter of more older people. Rapid social change — smaller households, a more private style of living — and ordinary troubles such as unemployment have left later life qualitatively apart, and as of 2021 the essay treats the difficulties of later life as a serious social problem. In earlier days, the duty of support was generally placed on the family and the children, and often on the eldest son, but with smaller households and the rise of one-person homes, that thought is no longer welcome. Even so, the number of older people one working-age person is expected to support has been rising, so training specialists who can help older people take part in society is placed as urgent. The long COVID-19 period, left as the essay places it, also pressed on this. Older people with weaker immunity had less freedom than younger people under distancing and limits on gatherings. They could no longer go even to the senior center they had used, and welfare facilities offered little in the way of offline programs. The risk of social isolation grew, and specialists have a duty to design a range of programs that keep pace with a changing social flow. The first competency is the design of elderly-education programs. From a social-welfare point of view, the ability to design a program is widely treated as important. Modern society changes easily and quickly, and groups already in a weaker position — children, pregnant women, older people, and others who need support — cannot always keep up. Even a meal may now mean ordering at a kiosk; a person has to know how to use a machine in order to eat, and for older people a kiosk order is complicated, not a simple errand. Elderly-education programs should therefore be designed and developed in step with that changing society, and the ability to see a change at once, take it in, and quickly design a program that older people can use is badly needed. Specialists are first of all asked to design programs that can be applied in everyday life from one moment to the next, such as kiosk lessons or traffic-safety programs for older drivers. The second competency is field practice in elderly-education settings. The essay turns to the YouTube channel of Bak Mak-rye, a creator also presented as Korea Grandma, a 73-year-old whose films are introduced with an endless challenge and the line that life is beautiful, recording happy days with her grandmother, with the channel’s direction named as the grandmother’s happiness. From the start of the channel to films shot just before the essay was written, the record is gathered in one place. In the early films, an ordinary grandmother can be seen, angry at her granddaughter, Kim Yu-ra, for being a nuisance, and unsure of new things. In the more recent films she says “I love our people” to her viewers, goes without fail to a new place, The Hyundai Seoul, to buy something pretty — sunglasses — has grown gentler, and has at last learned to enjoy being on camera, a grandmother full of spirit. She began, the essay says, after a hospital said she should be careful of dementia, with games and with trips her granddaughter arranged, simply in order to push the illness back; before long, her rich experience of life and her wisdom, hard to price in money, became the channel’s material and the pleasure of 1.31 million subscribers as of May 2021. Watching that channel, the essay asks, who can still say that older people are only a group left out of society? Before they are “the elderly,” they are people who have loved life more than anyone, who have worked with heat, and who have a desire to live beautifully. The experience and wisdom of a lifetime belong to a region that cannot simply be copied, and those strengths, even now, can be useful material in many corners of society. If field practice in elderly-education settings can raise a person’s own wish to try, and if the specialist plans fitting help or advice, that will plainly give the person a large sense of achievement. The third competency is counseling. Korean society is changing quickly. There is a saying that mountains and rivers change in ten years, and Korean industry has developed at that pace, so everyday thought, too, moves farther from older custom by the day. Support in later life is one example. Beyond a simple line between the extended family and the nuclear family, one-person households and couples without children have become a common measure in Korea. The mood of smaller city households plays a part, but more than that, younger children often no longer have the means to support their parents, so the unit of the family grows smaller and comes apart. The problem is the lonely older people in that setting. In 2009, the sex ratio of the older population is placed at about 1 to 1.3: when there is one man, there are about 1.3 women, and most of later life, the essay says, is lived alone after a spouse’s death. For older people who face loneliness and poverty, with little income and without a child’s support, counseling by a specialist is indispensable, and it is equally a quality required for specialists who work with older people who are being supported inside a family. In a changing social structure, the gap between generations is much larger now than it once was. Even older people who are being supported have worries they may not speak. On top of that, the COVID-19 period was prolonged, and in that setting two quite different generations were under the same roof for long hours, which can be a cause of household strife and also a reason for harm to older people. To help older people caught in that bind, many more specialists able to counsel online and in person are needed. Specialists should also always keep in view the possibility of counseling at a distance, and should make use of developing techniques such as automated replies or similar tools. They should share an accepting stance for tired older people, a way of supporting the solving of a problem, and psychological support, offering the level of emotional steadiness a person needs, without setting aside a person’s needs as a whole and without steering them. The essay then takes up death-preparation education. Because death sits on the other side of life, asking those who are living to think about death can at first seem cruel. Paradoxically, though, a process of understanding death is clearly needed if a life is to be lived well, because the more a person knows about how they will die, and the more they set things in order, the clearer the direction and aims of the life being lived now can become. Practice in looking steadily at death is needed if today’s life is to be made more meaningful. Hayama Amari’s autobiographical essay On my twenty-ninth birthday, I decided to die in a year (2012, Wisdom House) is cited: the magic in a life, a line from the book says, begins from the moment one is aware that it has an end. The book holds a fierce record of one year from a twenty-ninth birthday, the story of a writer who, at twenty-nine, pronounced a one-year limit on her own life, and who, through a fierce year, gained not despair but the courage to live, and showed the surprising strength of a human being who lives with death in view. As that book also shows, a meaningful plan for dying can become possibility and hope for the life being lived now. Korea’s death-preparation education, though, is still far from enough, because our society does not much like talk of death. The avoidance of the number four in the East and of thirteen in the West, the essay says, comes from an unconditional turning away from death. Every human being must prepare for death. To live a dignified life in front of a death that no one can escape, time is needed in advance to recognize it as a natural course. The writer then designs a remote death-preparation program, Life begins at 70, for people aged 70 and over. It is a death-education program for older people: a person entering the twilight of a life, the writer thought, can, when thinking about death, wake again the aims and values of that life. A moment is needed in which death is recognized as a natural course, so that the years remaining can be made more meaningful. Death education still feels unfamiliar, yet when the later part of a life arrives, older people already prepare for death in their own ways, including sitting for a memorial portrait. That preparation is often done in secret from the family, or, even for the person preparing, with a lingering unease rather than with a steady face. The program is meant to face that still-unfamiliar death education squarely, to look back on the life already lived, and to go through a review; it is a program that sets an essential direction of life toward a better death and that builds confidence. It hopes to keep a person from meeting death suddenly, without time to think or prepare; to help them, through death education, take death as part of life; and, by listening one by one to what older people think about death, to help them overcome fear and consider the direction of the life that remains. The contents are five sessions of sixty minutes each: Living at the end of death, in which understanding life and death is taken up as a detailed subject; I am to you, a time of finding oneself, including an MBTI personality inventory, a life review, and finding meaning through forgiveness and reconciliation; Youth, we begin, in which people who have met one another in the remote class talk, understand later life, speak about the life cycle, and comfort one another; Prepared twilight, I, in which various capacities for a beautiful life and a prepared twilight are learned, including legal preparation for dying, a dignified death, and writing a will; and I am happy, in which a funeral video letter is made, a past life is gathered, and a direction ahead is decided. Materials are a laptop, slides, and the Zoom program. The method is remote teaching, one hour once a week on Zoom. The writer then chooses a counseling technique to try: reminiscence. Older people can, through reminiscence, draw out past experience or thought. It is helpful, the essay says, because it can easily bring a range of feelings to the surface, and can sometimes help a sense of who one is. For older people who have many hours when no one can listen, a counselor who simply hears them with an accepting stance can already be a great comfort, and can be an experience of recognizing their own worth again. With an inventive stance they can look back on this and that in a life and keep unfolding new stories. Among reminiscence methods, oral, written, and contemplative forms are used; the writer used the oral method a good deal, listening closely to an older person’s words and drawing the communication deeper. When counseling proceeds through reminiscence, the rich memories and experiences a person already holds can work at once as a therapeutic element, so the effect is placed as sure. The counselor can take part in the talk with an accepting stance, help connect earlier memories, and help them be extended in depth. Joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure can be drawn out, and this helps the memory that many older people have and want to keep. Reminiscence can also help a person meet a present problem in the light of a success already lived through at an earlier time, and can raise a person’s own will to solve it. Inward self-efficacy then increases. In some cases, when regret about a life is heavy, darker feeling may rise and a low mood may be felt. Immediate emotional support and similar help can then give courage. This page stays with the 1960, 1988, 1990, and 2009 figures as the essay places them, and with the May 2021 subscriber count, and does not add later official specialist headcounts or later official population tallies. Lee Na-young and Lyu Ji-young, “A developmental-stage analysis of death-preparation education programs,” Journal of Educational Studies 58.1 (2020): 187–219, and Hayama Amari, On my twenty-ninth birthday, I decided to die in a year (Wisdom House, 2012), together with Korea National Open University lectures and a textbook on the theory of elderly education, are named as sources.

Last updated: 14 November 2026