College Born in Wartime

College Born in Wartime

The DPR of Korea set up a system of study while working alongside the universal 12-year compulsory education and the regular educational system.

Higher education system of studying while working was established by President Kim Il Sung during the Korean War (1950-1953).

Visiting a machine-building factory in Songchon County, South Phyongan Province in January Juche 40(1951), he grasped that what was the most troublesome was the lack of administrators and technical personnel.

If the problem is to be solved, he said, it is necessary to set up an institution of higher learning for workers to study while working. The task is not easy in the difficult wartime, but administrators and technical personnel should be brought up to speed up post-war reconstruction, he stressed. That was how the term of factory college came into being in the DPR of Korea.

Preparations for the establishment of a college got brisk even in the flames of the war.

Visiting the factory again in February, the President gave clear answers to all the questions arising in establishing a college including its character, the student enrollment and teaching methods.

He also took measures to dispatch teachers recalled from the front to a newly set up college, not to major universities.

Eventually, the first factory college was founded on July 15, Juche 40(1951).

Afterwards, the college made a rapid progress amid the deep concern of the Party and the State. The number of factory colleges increased to over 30 in the 1960s, nearly 100 in the 1980s and more than 100 now.

Officials and technicians who graduated from factory colleges increased steadily, playing an important role in developing science and technology and powerfully promoting the building of a thriving nation.

Today ordinary working people study hard at factory colleges, farm colleges and fishery colleges to push back the frontiers of science under the slogan of educating all people into scientific and technical personnel set forth by Marshal Kim Jong Un.

They would develop the science and technology of the country higher.