“Perhaps North Korea believed that its economic programs were still in too early a stage of development, and too experimental, to be made public,” said Chang Yong-seok of the Institute for Peace and Unification Studies at Seoul National University. “Instead, Kim Jong-un presented what could be a more ambitious, longer-term plan of normalizing his country’s educational system.”

The move would seem to fit with Mr. Kim’s attempts in recent months to at least appear to be open to change and attuned to his people’s needs. The North Korean education system has been in ruins since a famine in the 1990s deprived most schools of heating fuel, adequate food rations and school supplies, deprivations that some analysts believe continue today.

The rubber-stamp legislature extended compulsory education to 12 years from 11, promised more classrooms and said that teachers would be given priority in the distribution of food and fuel rations, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

The Supreme People’s Assembly also pledged to end the “unruly mobilization of students” for activities outside school. The official report did not elaborate on this; however, since famine struck North Korea in the mid-1990s, mobilizing students to gather firewood and human and animal waste for fertilizer has become a common practice in the country’s schools, and a major parental grievance, according to defectors.

The report did not say how the North would finance the first major overhaul of its educational system in four decades, and it is unclear how far the government will be willing to go in changing an education system that defectors say focuses much of its time on state propaganda. (According to defectors, students have been taught how to add and subtract by counting the number of “American imperialist enemies” they want to kill, and the North Korean report on Tuesday indicated that ideological education would continue.)