Inter-religious Conflicts and Religious Education in Contemporary Korea

Abstract

Contemporary Korea is a multi-religious society. Naturally, large or small scale conflicts arise between religious groups. Moreover, inter-religious troubles related to the educational system such as educational ideologies, textbook contents and forced chapel attendance have often caused social conflicts. Most of the problems derive from mutual ignorance about the religion of other groups. Thus, religious education is important, for it offers a chance to learn about other religions. Significantly, middle and high schools in Korea have included religion courses into their regular curricula since 1982. The regularization has provided different religious groups with opportunities to get together in order to newly develop a common curriculum of religion, to create new textbooks and to train teachers. It has resulted in inter-religious dialogues on various dimensions. Koreas case is heuristic and thus might offer a creative model for the improvement of religiously conflicting structures in other societies.