is a historic site where President Kim Il Sung received the first national education in his boyhood.

It is situated in Mangyongdae District, Pyongyang, the capital city of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

It was a six-year private school built in 1907 in a bid to teach local children the Korean language, writing, history and geography, and its first principal was Kang Ton Uk.

At that time, Changdok School was fairly large and modern of similar schools in the region and had more than 200 students.

True to the instruction of his father Kim Hyong Jik, leader of the anti-Japanese national liberation movement in Korea, that he must learn about Korea, Kim Il Sung at the age of 11 embarked on a long journey called the 250-mile Journey for Learning from Badagou, Changbai County, Jilin Province of China to his home village Mangyongdae in Pyongyang, and was admitted into the fifth grade of Changdok School.

Attending the school from April 1923 to January 1925, he studied harder than others and set an example for them to learn for Korea.

One day a student asked him why he came to Korea from Jiandao (the present southeastern part of China’s Jilin Province) that he understood was vast and good to live in.

Kim Il Sung replied that if he continued with schooling in a foreign country, he could not know the situation of Korea nor learn its language and history.

Once he received a Japanese language textbook whose cover read “Mother-tongue Reader.” He could not recognize Japanese as his mother tongue, so he used a pocket-knife to scratch out the word off the textbook title and wrote in its place the word Japanese, making it “Japanese Reader.”

When Principal Kang Ton Uk said it would be an honour for Changdok School if it was able to produce a man like An Jung Gun (an anti-Japanese patriotic martyr who killed Ito Hirobumi, mastermind of aggression against Korea), Kim Il Sung vowed that even though he failed to become such a praiseworthy martyr as An Jung Gun, he would become a patriot who would not spare himself for the cause of national independence.

He devoted all his energy to study, and even after school he always read newspapers, magazines and other books to broaden his horizons.

Touring Mts Ryongak and Jongbang and other places, he was deeply impressed by the beautiful scenery of the country and precious historical and cultural relics, and witnessed miserable lives of the Korean people suffering the oppressive rule of the Japanese imperialists.

During a summer vacation, he volunteered to offer night classes at Mangyongdae for the children with no access to schooling, teaching them Korean alphabet, history, geography, arithmetic and songs.

On the eve of graduation, he received the sad news that his father had been arrested again by Japanese police. He made up his mind not to return home before he succeeded in winning back the country’s independence, and left Mangyongdae to set out on another border-crossing journey called the 250-mile Journey for National Liberation. Back in China, he launched an anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle.

On his visit to his alma mater in October 1945, soon after the country’s liberation, he said that despite the passage of decades the school remained unchanged and it was a memorable place for him where he had learned about his country and nurtured his spirit of patriotism, adding that the spirit gave him great confidence and indomitable fighting spirit when he fought against the Japanese.

Today Changdok School with modern buildings and educational facilities is a role model for the secondary education sector of the country, and has produced a large number of political activists, heroes and PhDs.

At the campus are a statue of Kim Il Sung in his school days and the old school building.

Yang Ryon Hui