Most Westerners just think of North Korea as a hermit communist country full of ignorant inhabitants with no quality education. They might also think of it as a place where foreigners are not welcome and can be shot on sight. Therefore, it may come as a surprise that there is an Evangelical-run school operating in the capital that is staffed by an international faculty.
At first glance, Pyongyang University of Science and Technology seems like an ordinary Asian private school, with its well-kept campus grounds and students who look smart in coat-and-tie uniform. But the difference are important.
Walking down the halls, visitors will see huge portraits of the country's young leader Kim Jong Un as well as his father and grandfather, and students march to the cafeteria singing praises to Mr. Kim.
Desperate for top-notch education, the North Korean leadership allowed the school to begin operating in October 2010 with a set of conditions. These included using a curriculum and materials approved only by the government and a prohibition among its 90 foreign volunteers to proselytize to the students. The evangelical-funded school may teach many things but religion is not one of them.
The teaching staff, many of whom are Korean-American missionaries, have to be careful of their actions. One American professor was deported for trying to give a student a Bible. Two instructors, one of them a pastor, were arrested for still unknown charges.
The school offers courses in computer science, agriculture, international finance and management, all taught in English to the handpicked children of the country's elite - something that has raised led to the school being criticized for providing valuable knowledge and skills to people who may one day use them against the West.
Some may think that being in direct contact with the future leaders of North Korea is an opportunity to indoctrinate them with pro-Western thinking, but the students were instructed to report any subversive comments and the students are still forced to attend a weekly class in the state ideology of 'self-reliance'.
But for the teachers, just the thought of changing the children's view of foreigners in a positive light is worth the risk.
"I am not a capitalist, I am not a Communist, I am a love-ist," the university's founder, Kim Chin-kyung.
