A Crucial Measure Taken in Wartime for the Future of the Country

The respected Comrade Kim Jong Un said:

"The nursing, edification and education of the children and students are the most important of all state affairs, and must never be abandoned even if the sky were to fall in."

It is the unshakable intention of our Party that the issue of supplying school uniforms and school things to students and developing education is not an issue which can be done if the conditions are good and cannot be done if it is difficult, but an important undertaking that must be done unconditionally and with the highest priority.

When we look back upon the past, educational work has been regarded as the top priority of our Party that cannot be delayed even a moment and has been paid the utmost attention in the harsh times in the past.

President Kim Il Sung took unprecedented measures to reorganize education into a wartime system at the time when all things should be mobilized for the victory of the war.

In fact, throughout the world war history there has been a case where the economic system has been reorganized into the wartime system, but never has been a case of the education.

It is unimaginable to pay the national-wide attention to education and push it forward without cessation under such severe wartime.

However, the President never stopped education even for a moment throughout the Fatherland Liberation War from the standpoint that the war would not stop educating the rising generations.

President Kim Il Sung took all the important measures related to education, saying that education should not be stopped, even though the state was in difficult conditions during the war.

As many schools were burnt down to ashes because of the war caused by the US imperialists and all the human and material resources engaged in education were destroyed, some people thought it to be quite natural that education ceased as it was the wartime.

But the President, convinced of victory from the first day of the war, set forth the policy of conducting education in conformity with the wartime environment and took measures to put education on a normal basis.

One of the crucial measures was to transport the students' textbooks.

In general, textbooks are a friend of life that gives knowledge of nature and society to the students at the age when their ideological consciousness is formed, and one of the basic means to train talents. As a fighting soldier needs bullets, a student must have textbooks.

However, due to the brutal bombing of the US imperialists and the strain on the wartime transport, even textbooks that had been already produced were not transported to students at that time.

One day in March 1951, though busy dealing with all sorts of work with the heavy burden of the war, President Kim Il Sung grasped the conditions of how textbooks were compiled. Receiving a report that the strain on wartime transport stopped transporting textbooks to students, he called the officials concerned and took measures to provide them with the edited textbooks, no matter what might come.

He told the officials that the printed textbooks should be carried by trucks for transporting munitions, and took measures to mobilize a number of military trains and trucks.

Thanks to the measures taken by him, many military trains and trucks ran all over the country carrying newly published textbooks, along with munitions to be transported to the front.

That was unprecedented in the history of education across the world.

Therefore, in the DPRK fighting against the aggressors, the clear reading of the students were heard in the rural branch schools in the remote mountainous areas and even in the classrooms of frontline villages, which led directly to the fireworks of victory striking terror into U.S. imperialists.

In this way, thanks to the noble love of President Kim Il Sung for the rising generations, the transport of textbooks was arranged as the foremost of the state affairs even in the flames of difficult war.