What if the missing variable in North Korean human rights is not information, but learning?
For decades, efforts to improve human rights in North Korea have focused on expanding access to outside information. Governments, non-governmental organizations, activists and defectors have supported radio broadcasts, USB drives, foreign films and South Korean dramas as ways to challenge the regime’s monopoly over truth.
These efforts are necessary. In a country where the state controls nearly every official source of knowledge, access to outside information is not a luxury -- it is a basic human right. But information access, by itself, does not explain transformation.
Many North Korean defectors describe encountering South Korean dramas, foreign media or outside news before they began to question the system. These stories matter because they show that outside information can create cracks in a closed society. But they also raise a harder question: Why does the same information transform some people and not others?
Two people may secretly watch the same South Korean drama. One enjoys it as entertainment and moves on. The other begins to ask dangerous questions: Why do people there live differently? Why was I taught that South Korea was poor and miserable? What else have I been told that may not be true?
The difference is not the information itself. It is what happens after the information arrives, and that is shaped by context -- by whom a person trusts, what contradictions they have already lived through and whether their private experience has already begun to pull away from the official story they were given.
This is where education enters the conversation -- not education narrowly understood as schools or formal curriculum, but as a different way of asking questions. Information can be delivered. Learning cannot. What happens between those two is the question education seeks to answer.
As a North Korean defector and an education researcher, I do not believe my life changed because of a single piece of outside information. I did not escape because I watched one drama or discovered one hidden truth. My understanding shifted gradually.
I witnessed the devastating consequences of the 2009 currency reform. I saw hunger, fear and contradictions that official explanations could not resolve. I listened to others, compared what I had been taught with what I experienced and slowly began to realize that the world I had been given was not the whole world. That was not merely exposure to information. It was learning.
This distinction matters for policy. Much of the current conversation asks, “How can we get more information into North Korea?” That question remains important, but it is incomplete.
We also must ask what happens after information arrives. Does it connect to people’s lived experiences? Does it create questions they can safely hold, even if they cannot speak them aloud? Does it travel through trusted relationships, informal conversations, markets and family networks? Does it become something people can interpret, remember and use to make sense of their own lives?
These are not soft questions. They are strategic ones. If information access is treated only as delivery, success is measured by how many broadcasts, USB drives and messages cross the border. If it is understood through an educational lens, success also depends on whether that information becomes meaningful to the people who encounter it.
This does not mean outsiders can simply “teach critical thinking” inside North Korea. That would be unrealistic and dangerous. Nor does it mean information campaigns are unimportant. They are essential. But information is the beginning of change, not the whole of it. The next frontier of North Korean human rights should not abandon information access. It should deepen it by asking how people learn under authoritarian control.
Learning is what happens after information arrives
Too often, learning is mistaken for the simple acquisition of information - as if encountering new facts, ideas or images were enough to change how people understand the world.
Learning is neither confined to classrooms nor the automatic consequence of exposure. It is a fundamentally social process through which people interpret new information, connect it with prior knowledge and lived experience, negotiate meaning through dialogue and relationships, and gradually reconstruct their understanding of themselves and the world.
Information does not transform people on its own. People transform information -- and they do so together. Under authoritarian conditions, this social dimension becomes decisive. People rarely change simply because they encounter new information. They change as they interpret it with others, compare experiences, question contradictions and construct new understandings within relationships of trust.
Information is transferable. Meaning is not; it must be constructed. That single distinction reframes the central policy question. For years it has been, How do we get more information into North Korea? Education invites another: How does information become meaningful once it arrives?
The answer lies not in the information, but in the environments where people interpret it. So where does such learning happen in a society where public expression is dangerous and official institutions exist to reinforce the existing order rather than challenge it?
That is rarely through formal institutions alone. Schools may teach obedience, but they do not monopolize learning. People also learn through conversations with trusted friends, quiet discussions within families, observations in the marketplace, encounters with contradiction and private reflection on everyday experience.
In North Korea, the jangmadang is usually understood as an economic institution. Yet, it is also a learning space. Beyond goods, people exchange stories, observations, rumors and interpretations of daily life. They compare official narratives with lived experience, test new ideas quietly and make sense of contradictions together.
Only after studying literacy and learning did I recognize that what transformed me was not exposure to new information, but rather the countless conversations through which information gradually acquired meaning. Questions I could not answer alone grew clearer as I compared my experiences with those of others. Meaning was not something I discovered by myself. It was something we constructed together. That, too, was learning.
The political scientist James C. Scott observed that authoritarian societies contain informal spaces where people quietly compare official ideology with lived experience, developing what he called “hidden transcripts”-- private understandings that diverge from the public story the regime demands.
The literacy scholar Gerald Campano built on a related insight -- that marginalized communities do not simply receive knowledge, but actively co-construct shared meaning through dialogue, relationships and everyday experience. Together, these frameworks point to something human rights discourse has largely overlooked.
The places where North Koreans quietly compare, question, and interpret -- the marketplace conversation, the family dinner, the trusted friendship -- are not merely sites of survival. They are sites of learning.
I call this network of relationships, conversations, lived experience and informal interaction a transformative learning ecology. Within it, information does not remain information for long. It is questioned, compared, confirmed, rejected and reinterpreted, and through this ongoing process of collective meaning, making it gradually becomes learning and, over time, a new way of seeing.
The process is neither rapid nor visible. But historically it is how people under authoritarian rule have begun to imagine that the world they were given is not the only world possible.
Through that collective meaning-making, communities gradually develop collective agency -- the shared capacity to interpret the world differently, imagine alternative futures and recognize that the existing order is neither inevitable nor immutable.
In North Korea, this matters in a particular way. The regime’s power rests not only on surveillance and coercion, but also on its ability to make the current order appear to be the only one possible. Collective agency quietly erodes that assumption. Long before visible political change occurs, something more fundamental is already underway-- people are beginning to understand their world differently, and to do so together.
Breaking North Korea’s information blockade remains essential. Without access to outside information, there is little opportunity for learning. But information is the beginning of the story, not its end.
The more important question is not whether information crosses borders, but what people do with it once it arrives. Lasting transformation depends not only on the movement of information, but also on the processes through which people construct meaning together, develop collective agency and gradually reimagine what is possible.
Information crosses borders. Learning changes people. People change societies.
Jihyang Kim is a North Korean defector, Fulbright Scholar, and graduate student in education at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Born and raised in Hyesan, Ryanggang Province, North Korea, she resettled in South Korea in 2016 with her young son after escaping the economic collapse triggered by North Korea’s 2009 currency reform. Having received only an elementary school education in North Korea, she went on to excel academically in South Korea, earning numerous awards and leadership recognition, while pursuing her passion for education.
Drawing on her educational journey across North Korea, South Korea and the United States, Kim is passionate about literacy education and expanding educational opportunities for underserved children, particularly those who experience difficulties with reading and writing. She plans to pursue doctoral study to advance evidence-based literacy instruction and intervention, with the long-term goal of building a more equitable and democratic education system for future generations on the Korean Peninsula.