Not familiar enough with geopolitics or global economics to comment on how the regime survives physically or financially but I can hazard a guess as to how they

Not familiar enough with geopolitics or global economics to comment on how the regime survives physically or financially but I can hazard a guess as to how they keep up the cultural and intellectual "blinders". Reading this article I started to wonder how it would read if you replaced the North Korean students with fundamentalist Christians (or Muslims) in a majority-fundamentalist society. Then consider if the teacher was a secularist trying to find ways to sneak messages about evolution or atheism or even material that treated different belief systems with equal weight or validity. While I don't know of anyplace in my own country where a fundamentalist ideology is as entrenched as the North Koreans' is in Pyongyang, it's still easy for me to conceptualize. In the U.S. there are no doubt schools where a teacher speaking about secularism would prompt students to resist and parents to complain. With a country like DPRK, I just imagine it as if the most conservative, fundamentalist parts of the US were cut off from the rest of the country and never even had anyone try to argue that man probably didn't walk with the dinosaurs or that gay people didn't murder babies or whatever. Even if there were people who thought it was all bunk they'd probably keep quiet or risk getting fired. Add to that the fact that in DPRK you run the actual risk of being sent to a prison camp for questioning the accepted ideology and I can see why it might just be easier to play along. Normal people anywhere are typically more concerned with making a living and taking care of their families, not raging against the machine.