People-oriented Policies on the Increase in DPRK

One socialist policy is enforced after another in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, guaranteeing the well-being of the people.

It is well evidenced by the laws and regulations newly adopted or amended and supplemented in the past decade, including an ordinance of the Supreme People’s Assembly of the DPRK on the enforcement of universal 12-year compulsory education, the law on childcare, the law on housing, the law on the emergency epidemic prevention and the law on the development of city and county.

Thanks to the enforcement of universal 12-year compulsory education promulgated in September Juche 101 (2012), all children across the country are getting one-year preschool education and five-year primary, three-year junior and three-year senior middle school education.

Accordingly, textbooks and teaching reference books with new contents and of new forms have been compiled in a short span of time, tens of thousands of teaching aids and experimental apparatuses of hundreds of kinds made, and advanced and reasonable teaching methods including heuristic teaching comprehensively applied to suit the psychological characteristics of students.

Meanwhile, classrooms of many general education units across the country, including Kim Song Ju Primary School, Kinjae Junior Middle School and Kusong Secondary School No. 1 have been put on a multi-functional basis.

The transition from universal 11-year compulsory education to universal 12-year compulsory education marked a significant occasion in fully demonstrating the advantages of the socialist educational system of the country and bringing about a radical turn in education in the new century.

Article 3 of the law on childcare, adopted in February this year, stipulates that childcare is a nation-wide and society-wide undertaking, and it is an important communist policy to bring up children at state and public expense.

As a subsidiary to the Law of the DPRK on the Nursing and Upbringing of Children adopted in 1976, the law on childcare stipulates the order concerning the production and supply of nutritious foodstuffs for children and the provision of conditions for bringing them up. Accordingly, the state has established a well-regulated system for the production and supply of nutritious foodstuffs for children, and is supplying dairy products and other nutritious foodstuffs to all children free of charge and providing them with the best conditions for their growing.

Article 3 (principle of providing houses at state expense) of the law on housing, amended and supplemented in October Juche 109 (2020), stipulates that the state is responsible for fully solving of the housing problem of the people and this is an intrinsic requirement of the Korean socialist system. Article 4 (principle of housing construction) of the law stipulates that the state shall systematically increase investment in housing construction, grasp the construction in a unified way and conduct it in a far-sighted way.

This year alone, people moved to new houses in Songhwa Street and Pothong Riverside Terraced Houses District, the Ryonpho Greenhouse Farm village and many other houses built in the capital city of Pyongyang and other various parts of the country, all of which retain their regional characteristics.

The people’s happy laughter is ringing louder thanks to the increasing benefits of the state which invariably pursues policies for them while regarding their interests as an absolute standard of its activities.

Ham Kwang Hyok

2022-12-27