The article below is a piece of independent analysis and may not necessarily express the opinions of Tongil Tours as an organisation. We will be occasionally inviting followers of North Korean affairs to contribute such pieces to our blog. In the spirit of hosting free discussion, we will aim to seek contributions on a variety of North Korea-related topics and with a range of opinions.

BBC Panorama Versus North Korea Round Two: ‘Educating North Korea’

The BBC’s Panorama has produced another documentary episode on North Korea (view the full thing on Youtube above), this time focusing on the country’s only foreign-run and only private university, Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (hereafter ‘PUST’). While far from perfect, ‘Educating North Korea’ is still a stark improvement over Panorama’s previous North Korea-related feature, namely, John Sweeney’s ‘North Korea Undercover’. To put it mildly ‘North Korea Undercover’ was just another in a depressingly long line of sensationalistic, tabloidesque reports on North Korea. It had the gall to pass off as an ordinary guided tour (the kind taken by thousands of Western tourists every year) taken by somebody with obviously absolutely no contextual knowledge of the country as revelatory and insightful.

‘Educating North Korea’ still contained many of the kind of trite,and often plainly incorrect generalisations that plague mainstream reporting on North Korea. The piece’s other main problem was that the journalist seemed to entertain some hope that his interlocutors would open up to him on camera, when in fact no sane North Korean would ever do such a thing (for a fear of repercussions). We also know people who have formerly taught at this university who have alleged that the documentary’s presentation of PUST was not entirely accurate. To be fair, North Korea is an extremely difficult environment when it comes to reporting, so our journalist can perhaps be absolved of at least a bit of blame.

Once these qualifications have been made, ‘Educating North Korea’ still offers an interesting window into PUST, an ambitious yet so far relatively successful project which in our opinion deserves support and emulation (for the record, we’re not talking about their dreams of evangelising). Critics may lambast the project as rewarding the children of the North Korean regime’s elite, and there is some validity to this. However, and this may sound counterinuitive, but as Andrei Lankov cogently argues (making some interesting comparisons to the USSR) in his most recent book, this is exactly the group of people who we want exposed to a Western education since they are the ones who will hold the most influence in the future. Even if their conversations with teachers are limited to banal topics, North Koreans are incredibly perceptive, and (especially the youth) have a strong and sincere desire to learn more about the outside world. Given that most North Koreans are unable to travel abroad for education at least PUST gives them some exposure to foreign ideas and culture.

As for those students interviewed in the program who just returned from study abroad in the UK, knowing North Korean students abroad, we can say for almost certain that they didn’t, as stated in front of the camera, ‘just focus[] on [their] studies’. After the student being interviewed delivered the obligatory homage to North Korea’s leaders, the journalist states that ‘devotion to the leader appears absolute’, thus questioning whether such students ‘can ever be agents of change’. We would like to remind the journalist of the adage, ‘appearances can be deceiving’ , a statement which cannot be applied to few places as suitably as North Korea.

See PUST’s official Facebook page here, and website here.

See content on a person’s experience teaching at PUST here, here and here.

What did you think of ‘Educating North Korea’? Let us know in a comment below or in our social media feeds.

[Update: see here for a video produced by a New Zealander teacher on her time at PUST, highly recommended.]