A classroom in North Korea (Stefan Krasowski, Flickr, Creative Commons)

North Korean authorities have been encouraging students to model their behavior on a widely reported act of loyalty by high school students in North Hamgyong Province.

“A class of students at First High School in Chongjin cleaned the marble steps and the area around bronze statues of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il in the city under the guidance of their homeroom teacher. As word of that act of loyalty spread, the provincial branch of the Socialist Patriotic Youth League has been touting the students as paragons of loyal behavior,” a reporting partner told Daily NK on Monday, speaking on condition of anonymity for security reasons. 

According to the reporting partner, the students spent nearly three hours swapping down the steps leading up to the statue with clean buckets and new mops. Each student took personal charge of a few dozen steps.

The students in the class have been keeping the statue clean for years now. This April, they put extra effort into their cleaning because of the back-to-back holidays on Apr. 15 (Day of the Sun, or the birth anniversary of Kim Il Sung) and Apr. 25 (Military Foundation Day).

“When the buckets ran low on water, the students in the class walked a great distance to refill them, and they all made a point of buying new vinylon mops, even though they cost more than KPW 1,000 a piece,” the reporting partner said.

“When the mops started wearing out, they wiped down the steps with their own coats. That got the attention of officials from the statue management office coming in to work early in the morning, who passed the information on to the provincial party committee and the youth league.” 

The loyal dedication of these students, which continued in the first week of May, was communicated to students at schools across the city and province. The provincial branch of the youth league used the story to make teaching material that it has distributed to schools to foster loyalty among the student body, the reporting partner said.

Lie-ridden propaganda

But the teaching material apparently exaggerates the high school students’ behavior to a ludicrous degree.

“The material says the students cleaned the steps voluntarily, even though they were under the guidance of their homeroom teacher. It says they showed up at 1 AM for cleaning, while they actually showed up at 5 AM. And it says they took off their school uniforms to wipe down the steps, which they didn’t do. Other students have been asking why the material contains so many lies,” the reporting partner said.

After students read the material, some asked what the high school students were supposed to wear to school the next day if they’d wiped down the steps with their only school uniforms. Others wondered why the authorities packed the teaching material with falsehoods when the students are old enough to see through them.

Even so, the youth league is working on a campaign to encourage students to model their behavior on that of the high school students who cleaned the steps, the reporting partner said.

Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler. 

Daily NK works with a network of reporting partners who live inside North Korea and China. Their identities remain anonymous due to security concerns. More information about Daily NK’s reporting partner network and information gathering activities can be found on our FAQ page here.  

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