was particularly evident in the wake of Kim Jong Il’s entry onto the political stage, when the son happily fed his father’s appetite for accolades and vastly expanded the persona of the Kim family.
The founder’s focus on children and education is indicative of the regime’s calculated effort to raise good, loyal North Koreans. The CIA analyst Helen-Louise Hunter noted that North Korea’s education system was intended, according to Kim Il Sung himself, to “serve the existing social system.” Kang Chol-hwan, the prominent defector and author of The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag, remembered the 1960s of his childhood as happy. Kim Il Sung was “a kind of Father Christmas” who would send cakes and sweets and every third year would provide a school uniform, a cap, and a pair of shoes. His school curriculum included the usual arithmetic, music, and art, but above all children were taught to revere Kim Il Sung:
We learn[ed] by rote answers to questions such as: On what day and at what hour was Kim Il-sung born? What heroic feats did he perform against the Japanese? What speech did he give at such-and-such a conference, on such-and-such date? Like my fellow pupils, I thought cramming myself with such important facts was perfectly normal, and doing it gave me great pleasure. An education of this sort resulted in a wellspring of admiration and gratitude for our political leaders and in the willingness to sacrifice everything for them and the homeland.
Hunter wrote that Kim’s tireless crisscrossing of the country to meet as many people as he could—riding buses and subways, visiting collective farms, factories, and schools—showed “his special genius for establishing personal rapport with his people” and wooing them with his larger-than-life personality. A CIA document from January 1983 compared Kim’s campaign to win hearts and minds to that of an American politician: “Thinking of North Korea as about the size of Pennsylvania, it is easy to imagine the relationship that a charismatic governor of such a state might develop with his people over a period of 40 years, if he spent 150–200 days on the road each year.” Such efforts paid dividends by reinforcing the cult of personality and the lasting reverence that even North Korean defectors hold for the country’s founder.
In Kim Il Sung’s North Korea, it was also important for the children to be prepared to battle their external enemies. Kang recalled that like all his classmates, he joined the Pupils’ Red Army. The children formed ranks and marched with fake machine guns. “Right away we felt we were Kim Il-sung’s little soldiers,” he wrote. High schoolers, he added, had more serious training, as they “memorized emergency air-raid instructions, learned to hide from enemy planes, and to steer the population to the nearest air-raid shelters.” Victor Cha, the former Asia adviser in the George W. Bush administration, has pointed out that North Korean children learn conjugation by reciting “We killed Americans,” “We are killing Americans,” and “We will kill Americans,” and learn arithmetic by adding or subtracting the number of dead Americans.
This style of education has persisted through the generations. Yeonmi Park, a defector who was born in 1993, a year before Kim Il Sung died, said she and her classmates would line up during recess “to take turns beating or stabbing dummies dressed up like American soldiers.” The process of dehumanizing and demonizing the United States bled into the language. Park recalled, “We could never just say ‘American’—that would be too respectful. It had to be ‘American bastard,’ ‘Yankee devil,’ or ‘big-nosed Yankee.’ If you didn’t say it, you would be criticized for being too soft on our enemies.” The purpose of a Western education is to develop critical-thinking skills and cultivate civic-mindedness, as well as to prepare students to become productive members of the workforce and society; in contrast, a North Korean education is intended to instill doctrine, an unchanging and unyielding “truth” based on the Great Leader’s definition of reality. He is the sole authority of moral behavior and the only source of enlightenment, both in Kim Il Sung’s day and today, as his son and grandson have derived their legitimacy and authority through their blood ties to the country’s founder.
The North Korean regime was triumphant, claiming to its people that they lived in a socialist paradise powered by their juche can-do spirit, but at the same time Koreans were a “uniquely vulnerable child race in the Leader’s protective care,” as described by the North