Teachers at a middle school in Chongjin have been ordered to produce teaching aids outside their subject areas ahead of a citywide instructional materials exhibition planned for this summer, adding to a growing pile of non-teaching duties that is pushing the profession from one of the most coveted jobs in North Korea to one of the most exhausting.
A source in North Hamgyong province told Daily NK on Monday that education authorities in Chongjin plan to hold a teaching aids exhibition (a state-organized competition in which schools display self-produced instructional materials such as charts, models, and demonstration tools, used to assess teaching innovation) during the summer recess. As schools have begun preparing in earnest, teachers have taken on the additional burden of designing and producing the required materials.
The more significant problem, the source said, is that school administrators are pressuring teachers to submit teaching aids unrelated to their own subjects in order to maximize their school’s showing at the exhibition. The principal of one lower-secondary school in Chongam district instructed teachers to produce materials for subjects outside their specialty. “Teachers are asking how it makes any sense to be told to make teaching aids for subjects they don’t even teach,” the source said.
Performance pressure crowds out actual teaching
The push is part of a broader pattern. North Korea’s education authorities have been encouraging inter-school competition in the name of developing new teaching methods, and exhibition preparation has become a significant administrative obligation layered on top of teachers’ existing workload.
That workload is already substantial. Teachers are responsible for writing lesson plans, maintaining attendance records, preparing their own study materials, and supporting school infrastructure projects. They also rely heavily on financial contributions from parents to supplement their incomes given chronically low state salaries.
“Even teachers of subjects like English and Chinese classics, where a wall chart is all you really need, are being told to produce teaching aids for other subjects,” the source said. “Teachers are already stretched thin with lesson plans, attendance records, and their own study materials. Adding teaching aid production on top of that is pushing actual classroom instruction to the back burner.”
The source offered a pointed critique of the broader contradiction. “The state talks about nurturing talent, but the conditions for teachers to actually focus on teaching are not being guaranteed,” the source said. “It’s not just the education work itself. Various tasks and mobilization campaigns are piling up one on top of another, leaving teachers with no room to breathe.”
The result, according to the source, is a deepening gap between the official “education revolution” narrative and the reality on the ground, where performance metrics and visible outputs take priority over teaching quality. Teachers in Chongjin have been heard saying they cannot find time to give students the individual attention they need, and questioning whether the job is asking them to be good teachers or good administrators.
That disillusionment is reshaping how the profession is perceived. Teaching was once considered one of the most desirable careers in North Korea. It is now widely seen as an exhausting job burdened by financial hardship and an ever-expanding list of non-teaching obligations. “People are starting to say that being a teacher is no longer what it used to be,” the source said.
The Ninth Party Congress, held in February 2026, set reducing the urban-rural education gap and modernizing the country’s overall education infrastructure as key goals for the new planning period, with the Rodong Sinmun newspaper reporting that the aim is to produce students capable of contributing to revolutionary practice. On the ground in Chongjin, however, teachers say the conditions required to deliver on those goals are nowhere in sight.
Reporting from inside North Korea
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April 22, 2026 at 02:32AM
by DailyNK(North Korean Media)