opinion

The Workers’ Party of Korea set forth the struggle tasks of putting the country's educational foundation on a new high level in the shortest possible period by channelling national efforts at the Eleventh Plenary Meeting of its Eighth Central Committee held in December last year with the aim of building a country which gives top priority to education and whose education is the most advanced in the world.

It is the intention of the Party Central Committee that the state should take full responsibility for the problems related to school things and fixtures and educational equipment and materials and make steady efforts to provide educators and students with the best working and studying conditions.

The plenary meeting also adopted measures to push ahead with the renovation of schools, which takes the biggest part in strengthening the educational foundation, without delay as a national undertaking, set a bold goal of giving a total facelift to all schools across the country in the coming ten years and pursue the goal perseveringly to carry it through.

It also stressed the need for the education sector to fully accomplish its objective and mission. It called for steadily raising the intellectual level of all students by improving the quality of basic education in the general education sector, shoring up the education sector as a whole by boosting the qualifications of educators, reducing the differences between urban and rural areas in the educational level and establishing a nationwide educational support system for persons with disabilities.

In retrospect, the WPK has paid close attention to the educational issue since the outset of its founding.

The first central government organ established by the Korean people after national liberation discussed the pencil production problem at the historic meeting to signal the start of its work.

During the Fatherland Liberation War against the US imperialists’ armed invasion in the 1950s, measures unheard-of in the world history of war were taken to transport textbooks for children with vehicles for carrying war supplies and recall university students from the front to make them continue their study and a factory college was set up to originate the study-while-you-work educational system.

In the 1970s, the universal 11-year compulsory education at state expense was introduced in the DPRK for the first time in the world.

In the 1990s, when survival itself was as good as a miracle, the WPK continued to pay meticulous attention the education sector, regarding the education work as an important affair that decides the future of the nation.

It is the will of the Party that the proud course in which the validity and vitality of the idea of attaching importance to education have been fully displayed should not be allowed to remain as mere history.

Over the past decade, too, the DPRK took many measures for the development of education, bringing about a series of successes.

The universal 12-year compulsory education was enforced, schools have been built first in the areas hit by natural disasters and a large number of schools, branch schools and kindergartens were built and renovated and multi-functional classrooms above medium level were set up across the country. Under the slogans “Let us entrust our future to education!” and “Let us make education an education which can take charge of our future!” the educational structure has been changed into the one capable of providing advanced education and the teaching contents and methods have steadily been improved.

It has become a national policy to provide students with school uniforms and school things at state expense, a nationwide distance education system has been established to lay a foundation for everyone to study and it has become a national trait for all the people to give active support to the educational work as students’ parents would do.

The special measure taken to bring all the students in the flood-hit areas to Pyongyang in August last year for their education clearly showed how much importance the DPRK attaches to the education of students and the provision of educational conditions.

It is the consistent policy of the Workers' Party of Korea and the DPRK government that the education work is the most important state affair to which top priority should be given and greatest efforts should be directed at any time and in any stage.