North Korean authorities have ordered that the word “reunification” be removed from students’ textbooks, Daily NK has learned.
“The education authorities were ordered to review all textbooks from the beginning of March to the end of the month. The plan is to prepare a new batch of textbooks,” a source in North Korea told Daily NK on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
In the wake of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s policy speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly in January, in which he ordered the complete elimination of “such terms as ‘reunification,’ ‘reconciliation,’ and ‘fellow countrymen’ from the national history of our republic,” North Korean education officials are now updating the country’s textbooks.
“For this year, schools have been ordered to use pens or pencils to cross out words banned by the state in textbooks. The orders were sent from the Ministry of Education to the provincial education offices and from there to the administration of each school, where they were carried out by the teaching staff,” the source said.
Since there is not enough time to produce and distribute revised textbooks this school year, as a stopgap measure, teachers at each school are expected to go through each textbook with their students to cross out the banned words so that they are no longer visible.
“Teachers have explained to their students that the orders must be followed because they are in line with the party’s efforts to establish a correct view of history,” the source said.
Some teachers punished for failing to carry out order
At the end of March, an elementary school teacher in Uiju, North Pyongan Province, was fired after making students leave all their textbooks in their desks because the orders were too cumbersome to carry out.
“Teachers were supposed to spend five minutes before class crossing out the phrases identified by the party and giving the students a correct understanding of the party’s policies. But this was apparently a bridge too far for one teacher, who was taken to task for proceeding with the lesson without crossing out any words or even opening the textbooks,” the source said.
The teacher was punished for dereliction of duty for disobeying the party’s order and failing to explain to the students that the order was in line with party policy.
Given that the North Korean authorities have arranged lectures for teachers explaining the party’s change of course on South Korea and charged them with passing on this new direction to future generations, the teacher in question was also criticized for having ideological problems, the source said.
“Teachers attended emergency lectures – one in February and one in March – organized by provincial, city, and county education authorities. In these lectures, teachers were told to revise their lesson plans and to avoid using unnecessary words [such as “reunification”] with their students. The same lectures stressed that teachers are revolutionaries charged with preparing the next generation to lead the future of the fatherland and that they should be ideologically equipped as only such revolutionaries should be,” the source said.
“While teachers have been banned from singing songs like ‘Reunification, May You Come Soon,’ they think it’s ridiculous that textbooks have to be revised by hand and that they can’t even say the word ‘reunification’ in the classroom. But they have to keep quiet, knowing that they could be fired for saying the wrong thing,” he added.
Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.
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April 05, 2024 at 11:30AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)