A Research on the Religious Dimensions of Education

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to investigate the religious dimensions of theory and praxis in education. There are common objects both of education and religion to cultivate human nature. Most of all, ‘teaching’ is one of the common characters in the practical realms of education and religion. But the problems of this paradigm of education lie in its exclusive emphasis on the logical, rational, and analytic pattern of thinking that tends to cause the lack of attention to the multidimensional qualities in education. Subsequently, it has degraded the religious dimensions in the educational fields such as holistic, ecological, transcendental and intuitive awareness of the world and human existence. The scientific and rational circuit of “teaching-learning” has excluded the personal emotion, feeling and awakening in the field of education. This kinds of modern tendency justified the elimination of the spiritual and transcendental aspects from phenomena of education. Rites of passage offer us the educational metaphors as the chance to transfer educational aims of self-actualization to that of self-transcendence and to hold a balance between the two. Mytho-poetic imagination allow us to have broad thinking framework based on tacit and intuitive awareness enabling us to overcome the limits of the logical, analytic and conceptual knowledge in modernistic education. Religious experience can be integrated to curriculum or educational program, and different subject-matters. It is necessary to realize the human virtue by sharing education with religion in the integrative dimension. Preferentially, we have to dissolve the distorted ideas about education and religion. Then, It will be the field to give form the ultimate question mutually, like “What is the final virtue of education?” in the religious aspect and “What will be the educational virtue of religion” in the educational aspect.