The Immortal Leadership of the Great Leader Kim Il Sung who Wisely Led the Campaign to Abolish Illiteracy after Liberation

President Kim Il Sung said:

"Doing away with illiteracy is essential for pressing on with building a democratic, independent and sovereign state."

After liberation, the campaign to abolish illiteracy was an urgent task to be hastily solved in order to educate the people in the idea of nation building and to inspire them to the building of a new country.

At that time, more than 2.3 million Korean people were illiterate, ignorant of their words and letters, because of the Japanese imperialists' policy of obliterating the national culture and their moves to massage the nation.

Unless the illiteracy, the aftermath of the Japanese imperialist colonial rule, was eradicated as early as possible, it was impossible to successfully train the broad working masses of the people as masters of the building of a new country and develop the national culture.

President Kim Il Sung had a deep insight into the urgency and importance of literacy in liberated Korea and led the work to thoroughly make the illiterate people literate in short period.

The President wisely organized and led the campaign to abolish illiteracy as a nationwide undertaking under the unified guidance of the state.

For this, he established a state guidance system for the eradication of illiteracy.

Following the measures taken by President Kim Il Sung, the Ministry of Education for Adults was formed in the Education Bureau of the Ten Bureaus of the Administration in the Provisional People's Committee and affiliated departments were organized in the ministries of education of the people's committees at all levels to set up well-regulated guidance system and the national measures were announced and carried out as the decisions and orders of the People's Committee.

President Kim Il Sung ensured that the campaign to abolish illiteracy was carried out not only through the state administrative system but also through non-permanent literacy guidance organs such as the Leading Committee of Literacy and the Committee for the Inspection of Literacy.

He set up a national guidance system for the work of eradicating illiteracy and made sure that the state's plan for it was set up and correctly carried out.

Thus, a plan was set up to completely eliminate the illiteracy until 1949 with the preparation period for about a year, and annual and seasonal plans were set up and executed under the guidance of the state.

President Kim Il Sung wisely organized and led the work of eradicating illiteracy through a mass movement.

President Kim Il Sung intensified the agitprop to encourage the people to turn out in the campaign to abolish illiteracy and also conducted a mass movement for it.

In August 1947, President Kim Il Sung met Ri Kye San, who brought the harvested cereal from the land distributed to Pyongyang, led her to become literate as soon as possible and conducted the Ri Kye San-campaign across the country as a model of her who had combated illiteracy in three months.

The Ri Kye San-campaign was launched so that the work for the eradication of illiteracy was carried out more vigorously through a mass movement.

The President paid deep attention to providing the good conditions for studying as well.

He gave priorities to staff enough numbers of lecturers, took measures to provide material supply and made sure that the study period and study units were set up reasonably.

Thanks to the wise leadership of President Kim Il Sung, the campaign to abolish illiteracy was successfully completed in the early 1949 and the DPRK became the first country that completely eradicated illiteracy in the East and the country where the broad masses of the working people play their role as masters of society with high ideological consciousness and cultural knowledge.