As a kid, you might have read magazines for curious young readers, with articles on the lives of scientists, explanations of natural phenomena, or even do-it-at-home guides on simple experiments. Children growing up in North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s were no exception. Instead of Popular Science, though, they were picking up titles like Kwahak segye (World of Science), Sonyŏn kwahak (Youth Science), Sonyŏndan (Scouts), and Sae sedae (New Generation).
How was their reading material different from general-interest youth magazines elsewhere? According to scholar Dafna Zur, magazines published in the newly independent, fiercely Marxist country stood out for putting “refined patriotic ideology” at the core of scientific practice.
That’s as the education system “focused on ideology (sasang), science and technology (kwahak kisul), and culture (minjok munhwa),” Zur explains. While these terms were left “deliberately vague” by the state, “North Korea’s Marxist ideology saw itself as scientific in methodology and in its systematic analysis of the material and social world.”
A Kwahak segye article from 1949 presents the study of science as “true” and conducted “in a profound way” in North Korea, but “unsystematic” and “studied for its own sake” in South Korea.
“Even when walking the young reader through scientific experiments, the language of the articles straddles the aesthetic and moral,” writes Zur. For instance, a science report by sixth graders, published in 1955, says an experiment was done “carefully” in order to achieve a “deep revelation.”
As Zur eloquently puts it, “the ideological is the moral” in the educational magazines of this era.
Writer Kim Kyusŏp argues in a different 1949 essay that, as North Korea had been excluded from access to scientific knowledge in the past, the country was now obliged to make this knowledge widely available. Kim adds that scientific knowledge has no intrinsic moral value. Instead, it must “be guided by the right ideological worldview and morals and framed aesthetically in order to assure that science and technology would deliver the ‘right’ kind of progress” for the nation, Zur writes.
“The process of embedding science in writing, both fictional and nonfictional, imposes a moral stance that was central to North Korea’s nascent identity in the 1950s,” she writes. “Without science and technology, material recuperation was not possible, and without material progress the social and political project would fail. It was in the narratives of magazines for young North Korean readers that the scientific and the moral could be brought together.”
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Magazine editors paid special attention to how they could not just cultivate young readers’ imaginations but also direct them toward scientific developments that served the state’s interests.
“The frontier of the imagination was the ultimate target for moral and scientific narratives because it proved both the site of greatest hope and the site of greatest anxiety,” Zur notes. “For science and morality to be effective, young people’s imagination had to be primed and guided.”
In 1958, a provincial party chairman weighed in on the term fantasy in a roundtable essay that was published in Sae sedae. “Beautiful, realistic fantasy cannot exist without socialist morals,” he reflected. “Before fantasizing about the future, you have to acquire moral values.”
The magazine’s readers seemed to agree. In a response that was also published by Sae sedae, students suggested that turning fantasy into reality should always involve efforts that were “emerging from real life, following specific party directives, and responding to studied materials…” according to Zur. “Any other kind of fantasy was condemned as pandering to human depravity.”
Scientific and technological innovation is arguably still crucial to North Korea’s social, political, and economic ideology of juche, or self-reliance. Today, the state regularly makes international headlines for its controversial nuclear program and missile tests that rattle nearby countries.
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The publication of children’s magazine content on science may have driven some of this research.
“In postliberation North Korea, the urgency to build a socially cohesive and technically advanced country was predicated on the moral restructuring of youth,” writes Zur. “Scientific content in science and literary magazines proved to be an effective site for this goal.”
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