History of Factory Colleges in DPRK

In the DPRK, factory colleges have been run as part of the study-while-working education system.

The working citizens enrolled at those colleges apply the theoretical and practical problems dealt in lessons to production activities and realize in a scientific and theoretical way the working processes they have experienced in practice.

The country's first factory college was founded on the initiative of President Kim Il Sung in Juche 40 (1951) when the Fatherland Liberation War was at its height.

When visiting an arsenal in January 1951, the President came to know that a knotty problem in running the factory was the lack of technical personnel. He stressed the need to establish a college at the factory so as to train the promising technicians and experts. Later, he came to the factory again to guide in detail the preparations for establishing the college. After all, the first factory college came to being on July 15 that year.

After the war, he mapped out a plan to increase the number of factory colleges in order to further develop the study-while-working education system. Thus, factory colleges appeared at the main industrial establishments of the country in the early 1960s.

Chairman Kim Jong Il saw to it that factory colleges, fishermen's colleges and farmers' colleges were set up as a study-while-working education system wherever the working people conduct their production activities.

When miners of the Kumsan Pit under the Ryongyang Mine, a leading magnesite ore producer in the country, all entered a factory college on the same day, he made sure that its teachers came to the spot to teach them. And he took steps to generalize this experience and make the factory colleges run field study groups in the 1980s.

Today, the factory colleges have further developed in keeping with the demands of the new century under the guidance of the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un, propelling the work for making all the people well versed in science and technology.

In a few recent years, tens of new factory colleges were set up to train talents of practical technologies and a brisk work to put the educational contents on a practical, comprehensive and modern basis has been conducted at factory colleges across the country.