A Capitalist in North Korea

by Felix Abt

  With that sort of intensity of schooling, capitalist South Korea almost always achieves a top rank among countries ranked for their school performance, measured by an annual exam called the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). North Korea is not listed among this elite tranche. But for South Korea (along with China and Japan), the prestige comes with a high price tag: it correspondingly tops the list of the countries with the highest suicide rate, owing in part to the relentless demands of schools and parents.

  North Korea, on the other hand, does not gather data and, if it did, would not publish suicide statistics unfit for the workers’ paradise image they’re promoting. I heard the reasons first-hand at a conference in 2008. “Why should we have one?” Mr. Bang, a senior party cadre in charge of educational matters asked me. “Our people are among the happiest on earth.”

  Even if Mr. Bang was overstating the happiness of the North Korean people, it is true that North Koreans continue to be under less pressure to achieve than their southern neighbors. First, shortages of electricity and winter heating push families to relax during their evenings and go to bed early. Secondly, the strict socialist environment doesn’t offer a terrible number of rewards for capitalist-style competition. This lifts the potential for intense stress off the shoulders of North Korean students.

  Indeed, socialist North Korea has perhaps proven that Confucian faith in education does not need to lead to inhumane pressure on pupils and students, as it does in Seoul. Headmaster Lim, who I had a chance of talking to when I visited his elite middle school, was aware and extremely critical of excesses in Confucian countries.

  He explained to me that “learning through coercion and drilling, relentless competition between individual students combined with punishment as widely practiced in countries in our neighborhood, is bad for the health of the kids and has therefore been replaced in our country by a method preferring persuasion and explanation combined with encouragement for all, not a few to achieve success.”

  Is North Korea full of hardship and school-induced stress? Here, village children play in a river, a scene that’s increasingly rare given the long hours of studying in South Korea.

  In my agency office, my staff loved to chatter about their children’s performance in school. Mothers cheered when their sons and daughters passed the rigorous university entrance exams that opened doors into the prestigious Kim Il Sung University. Other moms, I noticed, cried when their children failed to meet these goals. One time, an employee brought cakes to the office to celebrate her daughter passing the exam, whereas another coincidentally fell “sick” when her child repeatedly failed the entrance exams.

  In that case, there was no other option but to leave Pyongyang to a faraway province. The universities out in the countryside were less prestigious and offered few opportunities for families to visit. On the other hand, all my staffers admired one colleague whose son entered the top Pyongyang middle school, where only the brightest children (along with the children of the brightest parents) were admitted.

  Although examination subjects vary according to the school level, most exams are based on main subjects such as Korean language, math and science. They also cover political topics like socialist morality, the life and thought of Kim Il Sung, Juche and the like.

  The North Korean education system faces similar problems to those of other developing countries. The country is full of underpaid teachers, overcrowded classrooms and a shortage of textbooks, notepads and pens. The after-effect of the economic downturn in the 1980s and 1990s was clear; aid workers who visited schools outside Pyongyang explained to me that school buildings have started crumbling and many textbooks look old and overused. Pupils have to write in tiny letters on notepads, since paper is scarce.

  But in some ways, North Koreans schools even outperform those of the developing world. From my own observations, it seemed that the pupils are much better at math and science than their counterparts in my native country, Switzerland. And I got the impression that even computer literacy, at least in the capital Pyongyang, was higher than in Western Europe.

  This is because North Koreans attend two years of kindergarten education, four years of primary school and six years of high school, all of which is compulsory and free under the socialist system. University education is not compulsory and lasts four to six years, while postgraduate studies last three to four years. A doctorate degree requires another two years. Higher education is divided into “general education” which includes universities, colleges, specialized senior schools, and special colleges for full-time students. The other category is “adult education” comprising factory colleges, farm colleges, fishery colleges, evening sessions of ordinary colleges and open universities for working students without formal academic qualifications.

  For a country with about 24 million inhabitants, the education figures are pretty impressive. Officials from the Ministry of Education explained to me that about 700,000 children are enrolled in more than 30,000 kindergartens throughout the country, which in theory should equal 100% enrollment of every North Korean in that age group. For work parents, the government has built about 20,000 day care centers for over 1.3 million children between the ages of one and three. For every dong, or administrative district in a city, there are one to two primary schools, also called “people’s schools.” In every ri, or rural district, students can attend one elementary school.

  Adding it together, about 50,000 people’s schools across the country have enrolled more than 1.5 million students. At the middle school level, about 5,000 schools host around 2 million students. More than 400 specialized senior schools and more than 250 universities and colleges have enrolled 300,000 students, a more elite contingent but one that is nonetheless large for a developing country.

  Of course, statistical numbers from both North Korean authorities and international organizations have to be taken with a grain of salt as they are notoriously unreliable. But even if we downgrade our estimates to match a better accuracy, the figures are nevertheless impressive for this developing country.

  It’s fair to say that the government legitimately wants high standards at its universities and adult schools. In 2009 I saw the slogan “Intellectualization of the whole society” at the entrance of North Korea’s leading science and technology university called Kim Chaek University. It expresses a very demanding educational objective dear to party and government and repeated over the years. In the words of Kim Il Sung, expressed in his “Theses on Socialist Education” in 1977, this means “comprehensive educational programs, eliminating the need for private educational institutions.”

  This is in stark contrast to other developing countries, like China and Vietnam, where education has been largely privatized over the last two decades with mixed results. Those decentralization projects have given rise to dubious “diploma mills” that churn out students holding pieces of paper rather than real knowledge.

  Though the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is a socialist country that is supposed to promote equality, the education system is not entirely egalitarian. The party has set up a more selective and nepotistic tier of schools tailored to the children of political elites. In addition, the authorities are systematically searching for talent among children from when they’re toddlers, a tendency common in centralized systems of rule like the old Soviet Union and China. A tiny swathe of exceptional pupils get access to specialized schools that train them in one or two topics, such as foreign languages, science, music, the arts, and sports.

  Only the offspring of high ranking cadres are admitted to the prestigious Pyongyang Mangyongdae Revolutionary School, which over eleven years trains 900 students to become the next generation of decision makers. Graduates of this school typically enter Kim Il-Sung University, or quickly land jobs in their twenties as junior cadres of the party, administration and military.

  The Kang Ban Seok Revolutionary School and the Haeju Revolutionary School, which both obtained the top qualification known as
“Chollima school,” serve another 700 students for an eleven-year education. “Elite” schools to maintain social class are not limited to communist countries, but are common in the UK (with Harrow and Oxbridge) and the US (with Andover and the Ivy League).

  Schoolchildren gather from the elite kindergarten named after Kim Jong Suk, wife of the founder president Kim Il Sung and mother of former leader Kim Jong Il. She was nicknamed the “Heroine of the anti-Japanese Revolution.”

  Far from being completely closed off to the outside world, the North Korean government places a huge emphasis on teaching foreign languages to its future elites. The country’s best foreign language school is the Pyongyang Foreign Languages High School, with a six-year curriculum with more than 1,800 students, feeding them into the privileged Pyongyang University of Foreign Studies. The school has 20 classes including English, Japanese, German, Russian, Chinese, Arab and Spanish.

  Most of the students go on to become diplomats or work for the foreign trade ministry. Others take up posts in companies that deal with the outside world. The school does not only teach languages but at the same time history, culture, philosophy, ideology and, of course, the way to deal with foreigners, as patriotic Koreans, in the best interest of the country.

  Some of my company’s staff graduated from the Pyongyang Foreign Studies University, and they were eager to take up work with a foreign-run business. I also hired professors from this university as translators for the Pyongyang Business School, and always found them well trained. To ensure these schools aren’t limited to Pyongyang, the government has set up an additional foreign language school in each province. Each school enrolls about 400 to 500 students.

  North Korea’s education system, as you might realize, does not follow the stereotypical, ultra-socialist “one-size-fits-all” approach, shuffling in ideological zombies and teaching them to drone away at the edicts of the Great Leader. Even more has been done to foster the future elites. One important move in this direction was the founding of the Pyongyang First Senior Middle School in the 1980s, together with 12 first senior middle schools named after the seat of a provincial government. After that development, the government established a number of schools that were all in accordance with the “model school” in Pyongyang. In each city and county the number of “first senior middle schools” grew to 210 in total countrywide as of the mid-2000s, although the number probably remains the same today.

  After a long day, students relax in the center of Pyongyang. One of them takes on foreign fashions by wearing platform shoes.

  The next generation

  The regime has also undertaken enormous efforts to nurture future generations of scientists, making it a top priority to the survival of the nation. A multitude of schools train gifted students in sciences and technology, a prospect that has been bolstered with a new six-year curriculum adopted by the Pyongyang First Senior Middle School and the Pyongsung Science College. Both have enrolled about 4,000 students.

  A 14-year-old student of the elite Pyongyang Middle School No.1

  Art (including music, dance and formative art) and sports schools, too, select students first and foremost in accordance with their social background. Within the core class, families are divided even further into a hierarchy: their admissions prospects are helped enormously if a grandparent fought against the Japanese, for instance. Athletes, artists and dancers were the intellectual masters of Juche, holding a conviction in this ideology. Today, this social class is well-trained in the revolutionary history of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, and uses its talents to inspire the masses to support the people’s paradise. The most visible artistic expression, which idolizes the Juche and includes thousands of students, is the Arirang Mass Games.

  Education officials try to discover and foster talents among students at a very young age, an important trait of North Korea’s educational system. One school girl learning embroidery while the other one is specializing in calligraphy.

  According to the country’s constitution, schools are required to educate children and youth to become faithful revolutionaries with unwavering loyalty towards the Party and its leadership. Article 43 of the constitution stipulates: “The state implements the principles of socialist pedagogy and brings up the rising generation to be steadfast revolutionaries who fight for the society and the people, and to be new communist men who are knowledgeable, virtuous and healthy.”

  On trips around Pyongyang and the countryside, teachers and officials explained to me the characteristics of the education system, which were quite similar to those of formerly socialist countries such as in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Educators, for example, combined a more book-based, theoretical education alongside field labor. It’s normal for students to spend their days in a classroom and library, but during other weeks to help farmers with their harvests or prepare for the mass show, Arirang.

  When the Supreme People’s Assembly decided in September 2012 to increase compulsory education from 11 years to 12 years and promised more classrooms, it also vowed to stop the abuse of randomly “mobilizing students for purposes other than state mobilization.”

  Another aspect of this system was the integration of both school and social education, the guidance by the ruling party, the socialist conjunction of general and technological education, and the preferential treatment of children of late revolutionary heroes. At least, that’s what a group of East European and Russian diplomats told me in an informal assessment.

  Even though the Party kindles the talents of its elite children, ordinary workers don’t go entirely neglected. Factory colleges offer five-year courses where laborers can learn to use sophisticated technologies needed at work. As graduates they are given a diploma that the government recognizes as equivalent to an ordinary college.

  The same goes for farm workers who finished secondary education. They learn farming techniques such as agriculture, stock farming, agricultural mechanics, and the study of vegetables and fruits. For fishermen, the coastline is dotted with fishery colleges that offer five-year courses on fish breeding, fish catching, boat mechanics, and others.

  Finally, the party has opened a number of special institutes, like in any socialist country, that don’t quite fit under the label of “university” or a regular “school” such as the Kim Il Sung Higher Party School. The party and government sends its cadres there every so often to invigorate their ideological knowledge on Juche as well as Songun, or the policy that places the military before all else.

  While we tend to look at the worship of Kim Il Sung as nutty, North Koreans have their own reasons for seeing it as perfectly normal. They are taught from an early age to be proud of being Koreans, rather than coming from a “less fortunate” race such as the Japanese. They are taught to see themselves as privileged compared to their southern kin, who they believe are oppressed by American imperialism.

  As such, North Koreans consistently told me they hold their leaders in high esteem, in exchange for earning their freedom from foreign aggression, as they see it. With this mindset, indoctrination through songs and dances, which all revere the leadership is considered a normal thing and starts as early as nursery school. Four-year-old children are taught songs and dances praising the revolutionary leaders.

  Around 40 percent of elementary school classes are on the childhood of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. In my visits around primary schools, I saw posters covering the walls that exclaimed “Our General Kim Jong Il is the best!” At the high school level, about a third of the curriculum teaches subjects such as, as written on the syllabi, the “History of Kim Il Sung’s anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist struggles,” “Kim Jong Il’s revolutionary activities,” and “Kim Il Sung thought on reunification.” Memorizing large parts of these histories is considered normal.

  North Koreans proudly show this off to foreign visitors. To the very Confucian and hierarchically thinking North Koreans it is natural and desirable to follow the path of their great idols. This is a cu
ltural gap, revealing the differences between the perception of Westerners raised in more liberal and egalitarian societies.

  A book for the fourth grade in middle school explained that in industrial districts of Seoul, the capital of “south Korea, colonized and suppressed by the U.S. imperialists” factories are just subcontractors processing imported raw materials and assembling under contracts with capitalist countries such as the U.S. and Japan.” It quoted Kim Jong Il as saying, “Relying on others for raw materials and fuel is like leaving your economic fate in their hands.” It should illustrate the superiority of the North following Juche, often translated in the West as self-reliance, to the non-Juche capitalist South Korea.

  Kim Jong Il went that far as to predict that dependence on foreign powers would lead to the failure of the socialist revolution in Korea. There appears to be some irony to the fact that North Korea received subsidies and other economic packages from Soviet Russia. But pragmatic Kim Il Sung found a way out of this apparent contradiction by declaring that countries he considered socialist allies such as the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China and Cuba should engage in cooperation, mutual support and accept limited dependence.

  For the children of foreign diplomats, aid workers and business people there is a Korean International School with a kindergarten in Pyongyang’s diplomatic village. The teachers are North Koreans who speak English fairly well. The curriculum for foreign students isn’t the same as North Korean ones. Teachers leave out the ideological bend.

  Still, those tutors made a few entertaining gaffes in the classroom. One day a teacher must have forgotten that he was not standing in front of Korean kids but lecturing to foreign youngsters. He said that Kim Il Sung is the father of all children in Korea, a statement that’s part of the curriculum but is usually self-censored to not upset foreigners. The two children of Romanian diplomats said they were shocked: they thought that their father was the man whom they saw every day at home, and not some portly Korean guy whom they’d never met.