The usual way to teach people something is to start with the difficult, the uninteresting, and the banal. Or at least in conventional education settings.

I think it’s how schools (which are generally pretty terrible places, run by the worst of our society, if we keep politicians out of that mix) operate, and it’s a terrible idea. It’s also a way to guarantee that most people will hate a given topic. And what’s ironic is that almost no one blames the school for this hatred of learning. You see the idiots with bumper strips that warble, “If you can read this, thank a teacher.” Well, fine. I’ll accept that if we can also the reverse: “If you can’t read this, blame a teacher.”

Which no one but me wants to do. Because who else are we supposed to blame? If a bridge collapses, no one blames the drivers crossing the bridge. Instead, we do an investigation and figure out what happened and place blame where blame is due.

But that could never be with public schools. Instead, failures are blamed on the parents or the students or the neighborhood, anyone, anyone but the culprits who are paid to do something and often don’t.

(And I’m including the mediocrities in public school administration: school principals, superintendents, etc. Usually, those people – and I use the term loosely – are more incompetent than classroom teachers. And usually not well intentioned).

Most people learn virtually nothing in schools. Another thing no one wants to say, but it’s the reality. Any learning that goes on in with someone who is between 6 and 18 is automatically presumed to be the product of schooling even when it’s demonstrably not. So schools try to claim credit for kids who learn to paint or play guitar or speak Russian.

But the worst thing schools do is making a huge swath of the population think learning is hard or unpleasant, or even worse making those people think the world is uninteresting because their teachers made them, for example, memorize lists of presidents.

If you are interested in a topic, learning will be vastly easier.

If you are motivated to learn something, that learning will, again, be easier.

Let’s talk about the most primal things we learn. Start with English, or whatever your birth language is. Do you start off memorizing dialogues or studying declensions? Of course not. You learn by repeating what those around you say and trying to please grandma when she plays with you. Or walking. You don’t learn to walk by doing exercises. You learn by trying, over and over, until it works.

I’ve said before that books are time machines. A well done book allows readers to understand the past, to comprehend how others in different times thought about the world.

And a book, rightly read and understood can help us understand not just different times, but different societies and cultures and countries.

Because we think a particular way in a particular society, in a particular area, and in a particular time. We sort of understand this with societies that are VERY different from our own. We instinctively know that, for example, a Tibetan herdsman has a different mindset than a software developer in Silicon Valley. But it’s not just those extremely different cultures. Even when we share a language and a nominally similar culture, the chances for misunderstandings are vast. To pick on another example, it’s painful to watch Americans in the midst of an Australian bar. Same language, similar background, but a vastly different way of thinking.

North Korea is one of those cultures prone to huge misunderstandings by outsiders. There are many examples of Americans who have visited that country and acted, well, like Americans, and faced very huge repercussions from their behavior.

I have never been to North Korea, and probably never will. But I find the country interesting, and try hard to understand the way people there think.

History books and scholarly works are fine as far as they go. But they’re not enough. If someone were to read a scholarly history of your life, he’d get a very sparse view of what makes you you.

Which is where Inspector O comes in. Inspector O is a character in a series of detective books written by someone who goes by the pseudonym of James Church. Details are spare about who this author really is, but he’s said to be a former diplomat.

Whoever he is, the books give an engaging view of life in North Korea. Never having been there, I can’t speak for the accuracy of their depiction. But it somehow rings true.

We tend to have two polar opposite views of how people operate in totalitarian countries. We either imagine that those people are drones who have no ability to think on their own, or we imagine that they are completely dedicated to destroying their government.

The reality is probably somewhere in the middle.

People in North Korea are different from us. They think and operate differently than someone in, say, Iowa. But at the same time they are very much like us. In North Korea and every country around the world, there are people at this moment eating, working out, having a cigarette with a friend, arguing with their wife, and shopping. In other words, all of the of ordinary, mundane stuff of life.

Which is where the Inspector O stories come in. Stories and music and music videos remind us that virtually no one is an robot. Inspector O is a retired (or fired? that’s part of the mystery) bureaucrat who is cynical about his life, but still lives, enjoys a good drink, beautiful women, and his wood carving hobby. In other words, he’s an ordinary man, and the portrayal of this ordinary fictional character gives us a rich and full picture of ordinary North Korean life. You can read history books and analyses – and those are important. But they don’t give us an idea of how ordinary people live. And that’s often even more important.