Yeonmi Park, a North Korean defector and human rights activist, enrolled in Columbia University and was troubled to find a culture of indoctrination. Seeking freedom in 2007, at the age of 13, Park and her mother escaped the brutal Kim Jong Un regime. Transferring from a South Korean university in 2016, Park commented that “even North Korea was not this nuts” after encountering the Ivy League institution’s forced ideology and conformity. In recent interviews she has expressed her frustration with pursuing a humanities degree at the prestigious university.
“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park, the author of the bestseller In Order to Live, said in an interview with Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different, but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”
Park explained that a university staff member antagonized her when she said she enjoyed classic literature and authors like Jane Austen. She recounted the person telling her that such writers had a colonial mindset and were bigots and racists, and their messages were subconsciously brainwashing her.
Similarly, gender issues, specifically as they pertained to language, also took Park by surprise. Each course at the Ivy League school began with students declaring the pronouns by which they prefer to be addressed.
“English is my third language. I learned it as an adult. I sometimes still say ‘he’ or ‘she’ by mistake, and now they are going to ask me to call them ‘they’? How the heck do I incorporate that into my sentences?” she asked. “It was chaos,” she added. “It felt like the regression in civilization. North Korea was pretty crazy, but not this crazy,” Park said.
“These kids keep saying how they’re oppressed, how much injustice they’ve experienced. They don’t know how hard it is to be free,” Park admonished. She eventually learned not to say anything after several arguments with professors and students in order to maintain a good GPA and graduate.
After leaving North Korea, Park and her mother made a grueling journey through Asia to escape what is arguably the most repressive nation in the world where they had watched people fall dead due to starvation. When they crossed into China over the frozen Yalu River, human traffickers captured them and sold them into slavery. She was sold for less than $300, and her mother was sold for $100.
They managed to flee to Mongolia with the assistance of Christian missionaries, traversing across the Gobi desert. Park later found refuge in South Korea. Her 2015 memoir recounts how she survived North Korean oppression and what it took to escape to freedom, which she also shared in a TedTalk in 2013.
In the United States, people “are just dying to give their rights and power to the government. That is what scares me the most,” Park, who now advocates for the human rights of North Koreans, told Fox News. “In North Korea, I literally believed that my Dear Leader [Kim Jong un] was starving,” she said. “That is what is happening in America,” she stressed. “People see things, but they’ve just completely lost the ability to think critically.”
This is yet another example of how far many of the universities in America have moved. Instead of training students on how to make a career, many have become political and social brainwashing camps. Christians need to understand these issues so that they are aware of the types of places they continue to send their children to, at enormous financial cost, and what ideas are being indoctrinated into them.
Pray- Pray Americans will wake up and see the danger that many of these institutions pose to traditional values and the long-lasting implications that will arise from this continuous indoctrination against Christianity.