Education and the Modern Authoritarian State: The Soviet Union and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea)

Max Stirner’s prediction was correct. The modern state engages in a variety of attempts to control the opinion of the population through schools, radio, television, public relations campaigns, advertising, political spin, information technology, the arts, and psychological warfare. In previous writings, I called this process “ideological management.”1 My focus in this chapter is on the use of schooling for ideological management in the former Soviet Union and in the current Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.