March in Korea marks the beginning of the new school year, and with that there are a number of new policies being put into place. One of these is that religion is being officially offered as an elective in middle and high schools (public and private) for the first time. (The Korean school system is six years of elementary school, three years of middle school and three years of high school. Many private Protestant and Catholic schools have been teaching religion for many years, but this has been on an unofficial -- and at best legally dubious -- basis.)
To teach religion, someone has to write a textbook. The government solved this problem by having each of the major religions in the country write their own textbooks -- within strict government guidelines. The Unification Church was one of the religious groups to participate in this project. So, there is now a series of religion textbooks -- one each for the three grades of middle school and two for high school -- produced by the Unification Church and approved by the government for use in all Korean middle and high schools.
The textbooks teach about all the world's major religions, but reflect the teachings of the Unification Church to a substantial degree.
Tim Elder Seoul, Korea