Evaluation according to the messianic elements in Iranian secondary level curriculum content

Formation of religious culture and education is necessary to pave the way for the emergence of Hazrat Imam Mahdi. To achieve such a culture, the public education system as the most immediate educational institutions receive utmost impotance in training the (pious) people who really await him. This study aims to evaluate the content of the curriculum in secondary schools of Iran to see if they suit the components of the messianic message. The research design is a descriptive content analysis with an applied approach. Statistical sample of this paper is the secondary school textbooks published in 1392, and four titles of books, Religion and Life, Persian Literature, Social studies and History of the Islamic Revolution in 10 volumes were purposefully sampled. Measurement tools have been the researcher's checklists of content analysis and the results of the research have been analyzed using descriptive statistics. The main results indicate that: 1. A total of 2551 times the main issues and related components in the messianic sense are mentioned in those books. Considering the amount if suhc mention, the secondary school books on Religion and Life, Persian literature, Social studies and History of the Islamic Revolution have respective mention of 1249, 785, 325 and the 192 times. 2. Each book has given different amounts of attention to the princliples of Messianism or Mahdism in its components. 3. Among the books reviewed, the book of Religion and Life in junior high school with 345 times comes first with 13 % of total mention, as the most attention, and the last is Persian literature book with 170 mentions or 7.6 per cent, as the lowest note to the related concepts of messianism.