Mick Hartley

As we heard last week, the official term for South Korea now, as recently decreed by Kim Jong-un, is "the South Korean puppet state". This new line also requires that earlier calls for the reunification of Korea were not only ideologically unsound and misguided, but, in fact, never happened:

North Korean authorities have ordered that the word “reunification” be removed from students’ textbooks, Daily NK has learned.

“The education authorities were ordered to review all textbooks from the beginning of March to the end of the month. The plan is to prepare a new batch of textbooks,” a source in North Korea told Daily NK on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

In the wake of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s policy speech to the Supreme People’s Assembly in January, in which he ordered the complete elimination of “such terms as ‘reunification,’ ‘reconciliation,’ and ‘fellow countrymen’ from the national history of our republic,” North Korean education officials are now updating the country’s textbooks.

“For this year, schools have been ordered to use pens or pencils to cross out words banned by the state in textbooks. The orders were sent from the Ministry of Education to the provincial education offices and from there to the administration of each school, where they were carried out by the teaching staff,” the source said.

Since there is not enough time to produce and distribute revised textbooks this school year, as a stopgap measure, teachers at each school are expected to go through each textbook with their students to cross out the banned words so that they are no longer visible.

“Teachers have explained to their students that the orders must be followed because they are in line with the party’s efforts to establish a correct view of history,” the source said….

“Teachers attended emergency lectures – one in February and one in March – organized by provincial, city, and county education authorities. In these lectures, teachers were told to revise their lesson plans and to avoid using unnecessary words [such as “reunification”] with their students. The same lectures stressed that teachers are revolutionaries charged with preparing the next generation to lead the future of the fatherland and that they should be ideologically equipped as only such revolutionaries should be,” the source said.