Speaking of the original Kim dictatorship, Bradley K. Martin says in his detailed treatise on the Kim dynasty, Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader:

" ‘As soon as you are born you are received by a nursery, then led through a flowery gate to an eleven-year education.'

"Indeed, officials told me, mothers were entitled to seventy-seven days of maternity leave before turning their babies over to public day nurseries, or in some cases full-time nurseries. ‘Home education has an important meaning in a society where private ownership of the means of production is predominant,' Kim-Il-sung had said in a 1968 speech. ‘But it has no important meaning in a different, socialist society.'

"The state, taking over much of the parental role, had been training youngsters to worship Kim. ‘Our Great Leader is the Supreme Leader of revolution, its heart and the only center,' said one official policy statement. ‘We have to inculcate in our future generations the absolute authority of the Leader, the indisputable thoughts and instructions of the Leader, so that they may accept them as faith and the law of the land.'

"Schoolbooks portrayed Kim in his heroic roles. Their illustrations were drawings in the style of children's Biblical literature... Some pictured Kim's exploits, whether real or imagined, as a child and as a young guerrilla commander. Others depicted a mature Kim, sometimes surrounded by children in tableaux reminiscent of the Sunday-school pictures that illustrate the words of Jesus, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto Me.'

"The training and peer pressure that reinforced such images had intensified over the years. Thus, the young people I met struck me as more fanatical than North Koreans aged forty or older, whose indoctrination had not been as thoroughgoing."