In August 1947, President Kim Il Sung met with Ri Kye San, a woman from a remote mountain village of Kangwon Province.
In her meeting with the President, she said in great excitement that she was distributed the land and lived in her house fairly doing farm work thanks to General Kim Il Sung. The President took her by the hand and said that he was thankful to her for coming all that way with wheat and potatoes she grew by herself.
Conversing with her, the President came to know she was an illiterate and said to her that man lives a worthy life and can make an energetic contribution to the country only when he is literate and promised with her to learn writing letters hard and send him a letter she wrote by herself till the end of that year. And he stressed the need to appeal to all the people to wage more dynamically illiteracy abolition campaign after she was literate.
No sooner she went back home than she built a school with her villagers and took the lead in abolishing illiteracy, too. After three months she kept her promise with the President to write to him one letter by another with her sincerity.
When it was the day she sent her letter to the President, the county where she lived held a rally and appealed to the whole country the “Ri Kye San Movement” for illiteracy abolition.
