Now many countries of the world direct national efforts to developing education.

The DPRK regards education as a patriotic undertaking for its everlasting prosperity and is pushing ahead with projects for sustainable development of education.

In this regard, The Pyongyang Times reporter Ri Sung Ik interviewed Tong Chol Min, a department director of the Ministry of Education.

UNESCO developed a lifelong educational programme in 1965 and conducted positive activities to attain the goal of realizing all-people education and lifelong education worldwide until 2015.

It has been nearly half a century since an all-people education was introduced in our country.

In his famous work “Theses on Socialist Education” published in 1977, President Kim Il Sung advanced an original idea on the comprehensive and sustained all-people education for the first time in history.

The idea clarifies the orientation and ways for simultaneously carrying on   preschool, school and adult educations. In our country they have become a reality and everyone can learn all their lives as they like. All these educations are given free of charge.

A Cabinet decision was adopted on abolishing the school fees of students as a whole in March 1959 and the universal free education system was introduced from April 1 that year, wasn’t it?

Yes, it was. On the basis of it, the universal eleven-year free compulsory education was enforced in our country from September 1975, and the law on enforcing the universal 12-year compulsory education was adopted at the Sixth Session of the 12th Supreme People’s Assembly in September 2012.

Accordingly, the state provides all the teaching aids, school fixtures and everything for experiments and practical training needed for the education of students and even bears the expenses for their extracurricular activities, study tour, visit and camping.

It is not easy to introduce a new educational system by extending the educational system for a year further in our country, where the state is fully responsible for all the burdens needed for education.

According to the policy of the Workers’ Party of Korea on making all the people well versed in science and technology, the number of students receiving higher education is on a steady increase, I think.

The higher education system of our country includes not only factory, farm and fishermen’s colleges but also on-site education through the distance education system run by universities.

Besides, there are lectures on science and technology, those on the development trend of modern science and technology and question-and-answer sessions on science and technology in various fields given at the Grand People’s Study House and the Sci-Tech Complex to solve the problems arising in reality.

Everyone can attend them and all educations are free.

In conclusion, in the educational system of our country everyone studies free of charge all their lives.

The educational sector works to steadily improve the contents and methods of education in order to ensure that the most popular educational system really benefits all the people and proves effective to the maximum.