Today North Korean media reports that Kim Jong-un visited the newly renovated Pyongyang Teacher Training College (평양교원대학).
According to Rodong Sinmun, “[Kim Jong-un] noted that the Party remodeled Pyongyang Teacher Training College with much care as it attaches importance to the teacher training colleges, a pedigree establishment for training teachers in charge of the education of children, and instructed that every province should spruce up the teacher training colleges with it as a model.”
Despite the glowing description of this model school in the official KWP paper, the school’s history has been a textbook case of “Our-style economic mismanagement” [(CR) Curtis Melvin 2018].
Up until early 2010, the Pyongyang Teacher Training College was located at the foot of the Ryugyong Hotel:
However, as work to complete the exterior of the hotel picked up, the school was torn down. In the image below (dated April 10, 2011) the school has been completely removed.
A new location for the school was selected in Mangyongdae District–the site of the old College of Mechanical Engineering. However it took nearly two years for renovation work to begin at the site (in May 2013). In the image below, dated June 1, 2013, you can see that renovation work has begun.
Renovation work on the Pyongyang Teacher Training College seems to have been completed by 2016, and it was featured on KCTV on December 20 (I could link to the actual video, but Google and Youtube have chosen to censor it).
I am not sure where or if the Pyongyang Teacher Training College was operating between April 2011 (when the old campus was torn down) and December 2016 (when the new building was apparently opened).
But we are not finished.
Although renovation work on the school was completed in December 2016, satellite imagery on Google Earth indicated the school was torn down again sometime after January 16, 2017 (Picture below dated April 21, 2017), and a second round of renovations had been launched. This wasteful economic management is apparently what the party refers to as “remodeled with much care.”
So Kim Jong-un’s visit in January 2018 indicates that the second round of renovations took just about a year to complete. Below are images of both renovations placed next to each other.
Unfortunately there are other examples of this type of economic mismanagement.
