The DPRK is a country which takes full responsibility for education of its people and ensures all conditions for them.

It sets it as an important goal to make all the people well-versed in science and technology in its efforts to develop the national economy rapidly and improve the cultural and technical standards of the people.

Ensuring that all the people are well-versed in science and technology is an undertaking to prepare all the members of society as intelligent workers with the intellectual level of a university graduate, and as the developers of science and technology. It is the further development of making all members of society intellectuals, a policy put forward in the past.

The age of the knowledge-based economy, where science and technology is integrated with production, demands practical talents needed at workplaces in different sectors. Regular school education is not sufficient to bring up such intelligent workers who are well-versed in science and technology related to their specific sectors and lead production.

The study-while-you-work system is the shortcut to making all the people well-versed in science and technology.

The DPRK established its first factory college in 1951 when the Fatherland Liberation War was at its height. Later, it set up factory, farm and fishermen’s colleges in different parts of the country to establish a regular study-while-you-work system, in keeping with regional balance and sectoral features of the industry.

A factory college organizes lectures to enable its students to study while engaging in production, and a farm college introduces such unique teaching methods as night schooling or intensive schooling as suited to farming work with seasonal changes. A fishermen’s college gives lessons according to fishing conditions.

Such colleges work out teaching plans and set targets according to the development strategies in their regions and industrial establishments and steadily expand and improve their scopes and standards.

Today, many universities are enforcing distance education to promote the work of making all the people well-informed about science and technology on a high level.

Kim Il Sung University, Kim Chaek University of Technology, Pyongyang Han Tok Su University of Light Industry and others have built up their own distance education colleges, with the result that workers in different fields of the national economy, including the Hwanghae Iron and Steel Complex, Musan Mining Complex and Pyongyang Kim Jong Suk Textile Mill, receive higher education at their workplaces through tele-education networks. By means of computers or smart phones connected with the information network of the e-library at Kim Chaek University of Technology, they receive lectures without regard to their location and time and have free access to any reference materials, including sounds and images. As seen above, they receive higher education free of charge.

The social educational networks, including the Grand People’s Study House, play a key role in making all people study.

Thanks to the study-while-you-work system, all conditions and environment are fully provided and steadily improved to educate all people, with the result that all working people are enrolled in the education system suited to their talents and hobbies to acquire scientific and technical knowledge related to their specific sectors and perform their duty and role as the masters of production activities.

The DPRK also strives to educate all people through technical symposiums and passing-on-technique system.

All the institutions, industrial establishments and farms regularly organize technical symposiums in various forms and by different methods for their employees to acquire advanced science and technology.

The sci-tech learning spaces in industrial establishments across the country are connected with a network centring on the Sci-Tech Complex, a palace for all-people study and a multifunctional hub for the spread of scientific knowledge, so as to disseminate new data from the central units to the lowest units on a regular basis.

The Sci-Tech Complex operates a distance education system for disseminators in institutions, industrial establishments and cooperative farms. Thousands of disseminators, including those from the Pyongyang Kim Jong Suk Silk Mill and February 8 Vinalon Complex, have received short-term courses of the system, and the number of newcomers is on the increase.

The DPRK provides all conditions for all members of society to study hard to develop themselves into able talents, translating into reality the ideal of all-people study on a high level in keeping with the trend of the times in which human civilization and science and technology are developing.

All its people are making tangible contributions to the prosperity of their country, studying to their heart’s content throughout their life.

Kim Yong Suk, associate professor and PhD of Institute of Education