On Aug. 31 of last year, the teaching staff at an elementary school in Taegwan County, North Pyongan Province, nervously gathered for an emergency meeting in the staff room.
The school principal had ordered the meeting after being informed that seven or eight boys in one of the second grade classes had failed to show up for assembly that day, when the school was rehearsing the beginning of the fall semester. After all the teachers had gathered, the principal had the homeroom teacher of the missing students stand in front and explain the situation.
As everyone looked on, the homeroom teacher said he had contacted the families of the boys who had failed to show up to the rehearsal while insisting he had not done anything wrong. But while the homeroom teacher was giving this account, the principal was on the phone, listening quietly to something before putting down the receiver.
The basic outline of the incident is as follows.
Before the summer vacation, the homeroom teacher had asked the boys in his class to collect maggots in bottles and submit them during the vacation as a means of improving hygiene around town.
After checking on the boys’ progress, the homeroom teacher based their classroom seating based on how well they had completed their assignment, from first place to twenty-fourth place.
One of the boys who got a low grade told his father, who was working at the county prosecutors’ office, about the assignment, and his father then filed a complaint with the education office at the county people’s committee. That boy and several others with a similar grievance were the ones who refused to attend the assembly on the fall semester rehearsal day.
While informing the school principal about the complaint, the county people’s committee instructed him to suspend the homeroom teacher who had forced his students to compete with each other and humiliated them so openly. Instead, the homeroom teacher was instructed to write a self-criticism at the committee’s education office and to receive three more months of teacher training.
The people’s committee also sharply criticized the teacher for encouraging the boys to compete by basing their seating on their performance on an assignment. That is the sort of thing done in capitalist societies, the committee noted.
The homeroom teacher was immediately replaced because of this incident, but that was not the end of the story. Even after the fall semester began, the group of boys who had boycotted the rehearsal continued to complain, prompting the school to give them several days of punishment including a self-criticism writing session in the activity room of the Korean Children’s Union.
The boys’ parents then filed a group complaint with the education department of the North Pyongan Province People’s Committee, arguing that the school itself was to blame for what had happened to the boys.
In the end, the education department ordered the school to apologize to the boys’ families. While there was nothing wrong with giving elementary school students the summer assignment of collecting maggots, department officials said, the school was wrong to base their classroom seating on their performance on that assignment and to immediately punish them and make them write self-criticisms instead of attempting to reason with them first.
Thus ended the hoopla that occurred at the beginning of last year’s fall semester.
Translated by David Carruth. Edited by Robert Lauler.
Daily NK works with a network of sources who live inside North Korea, China and elsewhere. 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.
Please direct any comments or questions about this article to dailynkenglish@uni-media.net.
