Honoring the Teacher and Revering His Teachings with High Qualities

The Korean people have always had the tradition of attaching much importance to education. There are sayings among the Korean people that go like this: “However difficult the life is, the children must be afforded to go to school ” and “We would rather gnaw at the barks in order to afford the children to school”. After the liberation of the Northeast, the Korean people in Yanbian, under the lead of the Chinese Communist Party, raised the mass upsurge of opening schools many times and accelerated the development of education. In 1949, there were 31 middle schools. In 1952, elementary education was basically made universal. In 1958, junior high school education was popularized by and large, and senior high school education developed to a large extent, what’s more, young and middle-aged illiterates were basically eliminated. On April 1st, the first university for minorities in China was established – Yanbian University. After 1958, a number of institutions of higher learning were established, such as Yanbian Medical Institute, Yanbian Agricultural Institute, Yanbian Branch School of Jinlin Academy of Arts, and Yanbian Teachers’ Training School. According to the investigation and statistics in 1990, among every one thousand Koreans, there are 822.5 educated people, which is far above the national level of 698.1 and the average level of minorities. And among every one thousand Koreans, there are 20 people with college education background (Yanbian has 44), which is again highly above the national level of 6.

As a result of the fairly high cultural qualities of the Korean nationality, the number of people who are engaged in brainwork such as science, culture and so on is far more than that of the average national level, and numbers of scientific and technological as well as cultural and arts talents are constantly emerging.