Turning into the new century, cultural-arts has become one of the key factors that influence the development of society. As such, this has heightened interest in the need to further develop cultural-arts education for future generations. Furthermore, there have been calls for State-level involvement leading to political support for cultural-arts. Recently, within cultural-arts, interest in theatre education has grown so much that theatre is now being pursued as an independent and substantive subject. Thus, it is evident that it is necessary to analyze the direction that theatre and cultural-arts education should take through discussions such as these. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the current Korean cultural-arts education regime, focusing on how the present system and its policy impact on theatre education and on what direction it should take. In order to achieve this, there will be an analysis of the current status of cultural-arts education, and of theatre education and its future direction. Firstly, the concepts, significance and policies of cultural-arts and theatre education are introduced. Cultural-arts education played a pivotal role in determining one’s identity, improving the quality of life, developing creativity and the advancement of national competitiveness. Such social framework was influenced by theatre education itself in the form of the development of independent thinking, establishment of social self-consciousness, emotional stability, experiencing fun art, imagination growth and working cooperatively. Also, the government’s political efforts have resulted in the realization of the value of cultural-arts in public education, expansion of opportunities to participate for people of all social levels, training cultural-arts professionals, giving support to field activities and becoming sympathetic to the cultural-arts environment. Subsequently, in order to review what effect cultural-arts policy has on theatre education, the circumstances in which such policy was applied to theatre education was examined. From this, it was seen that issues arose when the cultural-arts education policy was applied to theatre education including school theatre education, social theatre education and theatre education for training professional artists. A problem was that theatre education was not seen to be of special importance because the bodies that could provide students with such education were limited. Furthermore, since implementation of the cultural-arts education policy was not specialized, the development of and research into proper programs were not effectively carried out. Such problems have restrained the carefree nature of this study, which is an essential characteristic of cultural-arts and theatre education. Based on the above review and results, it is suggested that in order to further develop cultural-arts education, the direction that needs to be taken is for the bodies that provide cultural-arts and theatre education to be diversified, the systematic implementation of such education to be specialized, the framework for such education to be modified, and there to be stable institutionalized support for it.