Abstract:

The crises that society has overcome in recent decades, including economic ones, can also be seen as a consequence of an educational strategy that systematically underestimated the importance of the humanities and their knowledge for technical, economic, natural or security sciences. The truth is that the role of education has not been relativized in the way that it is devalued due to today's downplaying of lies and misinformation, but the contribution and relevance of a particular branch of science has been relativized. The consequence was that we educated people at universities for a long time who had the potential to be excellent experts in their profession, (The consequence was that for a long time at universities we had been educating people who had the potential to be excellent experts in their profession,) but without any sensitivity to the ethical dimensions of their activity, without awareness of their belonging to a larger social whole, without awareness of their civilizational footprint. How else to interpret the economic crisis of 2008 than a consequence of a certain moral crisis?

Education in the field of security sciences is a specific challenge for educators for several reasons. First of all, our goal is to educate people in fields that, in terms of their focus, are extremely demanding not only professionally, but also personally in terms of stress management, successful resolution of borderline and crisis situations, but also in terms of personality crises. Successful coordination of the resolution of crisis situations is not only based on the adoption of the legal procedure, but also requires the so-called soft skills from the crisis management, as the development of practice in this field shows us.

At our workplace, we have a long-term goal of implementing education in ethics dominantly with the aim of acquiring specific soft skills in our study program. This intention is also followed by our research activities, as evidenced by the KEGA project Implementation of knowledge from social, behavioral and humanistic scientific disciplines in the preparation of students of the study field of security science (043ŽU-4/2022). From the point of view of profiling our graduates, we consider the following soft skills to be key: communication skills (including public speaking), creativity, adaptability, teamwork, resistance to stress, assertiveness, negotiation and conflict resolution. Within the subject composition of our study program, we have created separate subjects aimed at acquiring these competencies, for example: The Case studies in crisis management, The Development of work teams, The Crisis communication, The Disaster medicine, The Psychology and crisis intervention, The Reliability of the human factor, The Survival course. It is indisputable that the education of ethics with this goal is a challenge from the point of view of pedagogical practice, because it requires specific preparation and therefore also specific didactic methods from both the teacher and the student. In our contribution, we focus on the reflection of our experiences with the teaching of the given subjects at our workplace with the aim of re-evaluating the methodological starting points and preferred methods used in the teaching process.

Keywords:

Education, soft skills, security sciences, implementation of ethics in the educational process, crisis situation, social sciences.