The city of Pyongsong was new for many of us; even our tour
guide had never visited before. Located an hour north of Pyongyang, Pyongsong is
currently being developed as the country’s new center for science and
technology.
The city at first glance was surprisingly green. Our first stop was a place called Paeksong-ri, famous for its pine forests.
I could not put my finger on what was strange about the statue of Kim Il Sung
when we first walked up to it to pay our respects. Later I noticed that he was dwarfed by the
trees behind him. Everywhere else I had seen him he stood tall on the largest,
barren hill. Here, he seemed to have found his place in nature.
Paeksong-ri is where close to a thousand
students and professors from Kim Il Sung University established an ad hoc
school after fleeing Pyongyang toward the end of the Korean War. We toured the
refurbished kitchens, classrooms, and dormitories as a local guide explained
how the benevolent Kim Il Sung visited the students during the harsh winter and
encouraged them to persist with their studies.
As a teacher myself, I found it inspiring to hear how
much the students valued their education. Nevertheless,
it was sobering to the point of horrifying that so much of their education
sounded like mere propaganda, and that their motivation was to exact revenge on
the “American beasts.” I believe that education is a right, but indoctrination
is a perversion of that ideal.
Afterward we had a tour of a food factory that
produced liquor, crackers, rice cakes
and other wheat-based products. First we visited the control center that
monitors the production process and the workers.
Factory workers labor under slogans exhorting their “hearts
to beat for the Motherland!”
The highlight of our trip to Pyongsong was undoubtedly the time spent
at Kim Jong Suk First Middle School . We drew stares from the students as our
bus pulled up in the middle of the school day.
We were also able to visit an English class.
During the tour of the school we were shown science projects and the awards some students had won at international competitions.
The poster at the center of this photo displays the design for a pen that helps in the study of an international language. Our guide was very proud to tell us
about a student who had recently won a silver medal at an international math
competition.
The English class we visited was studying time and
different calendar systems. I glanced at the textbook they were using and
noticed it was the same textbook as the one used in the foreign language school. It seemed to have a great deal of long
passages of reading comprehension, rather than focusing on conversational
skills. The classroom was bare except for portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong
Il. There were also placards championing education. I was a bit surprised to see a working
television screen. In more ways than one, this North Korean school resembled a
typical school in South Korea.
The students were exemplary in every way. They
listened attentively to their teacher and seemed to have the correct answers
memorized. Though I suspected they have rehearsed prior to our arrival, it turned out that
their overall English level was really quite good. Many of us on the tour were English teachers in South Korea. We all thought the North
Korean students were respectful (they all raised their hands and stood up
before speaking), curious (they never hesitated to ask questions), and, of
course, eager to play games.
The best part was the few minutes we had to chat
in small groups with the students. The opportunity for them to practice English with
native speakers is extremely rare, and my impression was that they appreciated
and enjoyed it. It was also rewarding for us to be granted the opportunity to
visit a North Korean school to get a glimpse inside their education system. I was
pleased that we could sit in on a class instead of sitting through a cultural
performance put on by one of the capital’s “showcase” schools.
Upon our return to Pyongyang we took a tour of the
Grand People’s Study House, the capital’s palatial library. It is one of the
few buildings in the capital built in the traditional Korean style. The interior, on the other hand, is as
North Korean as you can get – marble
floors, flickering chandeliers and a large statue of Kim Il Sung sitting before a painting of Mt. Baekdu.
Everything about our tour of the library was eerily Truman
Show-esque, in that a lot of what we we saw had been placed there
expressly for us. For example, a carton of books rolled out of the automated
book-lending system right as we arrived at the lending desk. Among the titles
were Huckleberry Finn and Gone with the Wind. Neither books, I was told, were permitted to
be checked out by North Koreans. Lights in the hallways and some study rooms
would flicker when we passed by but would turn off as soon as we left. In this
photograph I took of a computer lab, every screen displays the same thing
because all of the computers were turned on just before we entered the room.
While this may have been the case for every official destination throughout
the week, it was only jarringly evident at the library.
Facilities available for visitors to the library include
televisions, stereos, computers with access to the North Korean intranet and
the library lending system, and tape recorders that I recognized from my high
school foreign language class ten years ago. It was all very dated but it
seemed to work fine. When we got to the music study hall our tour guide
cheerfully played us “American Pie” on a large boom box; much to the annoyance
of some students who were actually there to study.
We were also able to converse with North Koreans who
were studying English in their spare time and, like the students we had met at
the middle school, jumped at the opportunity to practice with native speakers.
One man earnestly told me that he needed to study English so he could conduct
business with foreign countries and also, as I heard many times before and
after, “in order to improve the Fatherland”. These
interactions were not scripted of course, but everything else was.
