The DPRK has been able to fully demonstrate its overall power and prestige to the world in the face of severe challenges and trials and it is unthinkable apart from the history of development of Juche-oriented education.

The historic root of the DPRK’s socialist educational system was provided in the period of the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle.

President Kim Il Sung showed close concern for the training of rising generations who would carry on the lineage of the revolution in the early period of the anti-Japanese revolutionary struggle.

He set up Samgwang, Jinmyong and Samsong schools and night schools and saw to it that peasants and their children, young and middle-aged people and women studied there free of charge.

The schools became meaningful educational institutions where the first free education was enforced in the educational history of the DPRK.

After Korea’s liberation, Kim Il Sung discussed a pencil production problem at the first meeting of the Provisional People's Committee of North Korea and made sure that a university was built before founding the army and state.

He took a measure of recalling university students who were fighting on the front in the period of the fierce Fatherland Liberation War fought against the armed invasion of the US imperialists in the early 1950s, which was unprecedented in the world history of war, and made sure that textbooks were transported by vehicles carrying war supplies and factory colleges were built to give birth to a talent-training centre where the study-while-you-work system was enforced.

Thanks to his wise leadership, the Korean people could abolish illiteracy in a short time after liberation and enforced the universal 11-year compulsory education for the first time in the world in the 1970s.

Chairman Kim Jong Il, who regarded education as an important matter deciding the future of a nation, spared nothing for the education sector and directed close concern to it in the 1990s when the world was following the situation of the DPRK, saying that its survival itself would be a miracle.

Under his leadership, the reading of learning resounded more loudly through school windows and a contingent of sci-tech personnel who would lead the campaign of breaking through the cutting edge were brought up.

At present, measures have been taken to develop education in line with the requirements of the times, which include the securing of educational forces, reorganizing of educational structure and strengthening of state investment into education and social assistance for it.

The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un illuminates a bright future capable of developing the country’s education into the most advantageous and ideal one with his extraordinary insight and ideological and theoretical wisdom.

He put forward a series of ideas and theories such as the ideas that where science is an engine drawing economic development, the mother of science is education and that education is the foundation of state building and an important criterion determining national power and the idea of bringing about a revolution in education in the new century. And he wisely leads the efforts to bring about a radical change in the education of younger generations, the training of national cadres and the education of talents.

Today, the universal 12-year compulsory education is enforced in the DPRK, schools are built first in the disaster-stricken areas and it has become a state policy to provide students with school uniforms and supplies at state expense.

Under the slogans “Let us entrust our future to education!” and “Let us turn the education into one that can take charge of our future!” a nationwide distance education system has been established, all the people have turned out in education as parents of students and a habit of giving strong support to education has been established in all fields and units.

As in the past, the DPRK gives definite precedence to education, does never suspend or neglect education of rising generations whatever the situation and paves the way for prosperity by bringing about a radical turn in education.