With the universal 12-year compulsory education launched over ten years ago, the DPRK has made another progress in secondary education by shifting to the implementation of the selective course system in April this year.
In the countries with developed education, such a system is in place only at institutions of higher education through a long-term research and experimental stage, and, in case where it is introduced into general education, it is limited to some specific schools. This is because the system requires enormous human, intellectual and material resources to be consumed in working out a new educational programme, providing relevant textbooks and conditions for experiments and practice, and determining the range and level of the educational contents according to schools and subjects.
If you look into the introduction of the selective courses in the DPRK, you can notice that it successfully adopted them in a very short span of time.
According to local officials concerning education, it was in September 2022 that the issue of reforming the educational structure in such a way as to give advanced education was brought up, and selective courses began to be run on a trial basis in schools in several cities and counties in April 2025. This means that it took the DPRK no more than two years and a half to prepare for the new system ranging from working out the relevant programme to operating a trial run. Great efforts were made to revise the universal 12-year compulsory education programme, compile textbooks for different schools, grades and subjects, strengthen teaching force and lay the foundation for experiments and practice. The kinds of textbooks alone increased three times as compared to the past—a workload a 1 000-odd-strong compiling team carried out.
In September 2022, Kim Jong Un, General Secretary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, unveiled a plan for transforming the educational structure into an advanced one and improving the teaching contents and methods accordingly. At the Sixth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Party Central Committee in December 2022, he articulated concrete measures for designing and implementing curricula at senior middle schools and technical senior middle schools so that students can select subjects on their own according to their individualities. And he made sure that a plenary meeting of the Party Central Committee convened in June 2023 adopted a decision on setting the structural reform as an important task facing the educational sector and the undertakings for its implementation was pushed forward with the drive.
Since April, the senior middle schools including technical ones across the country have been running science, literature, arts, physical education and technical courses so that students can learn according to their aptitudes, hobbies and wishes. Given that the future of a state or nation depends on how many personnel of practical abilities and sci-tech talents are trained, it is believed that the DPRK will make more-than-expected progress in the future.
