Kung Tung Technical Senior High School in Taitung County, southeastern Taiwan offers a course that is found at only a few other schools throughout the country. The curriculum is designed to train students in a vocation that is not as popular a career choice as it once was in Taiwan, but one that 17-year-old Chao Chien-chun (趙健鈞) found he has a keen interest in—carpentry. In addition to building furniture, Chao discovered that he has a talent for making wooden doors and window frames. “I think it’s important to gain an advantage over your peers by having proficiency in a particular line of work. That’s why I chose Kung Tung,” Chao says regarding the school where his passion for carpentry developed.
Founded in 1960 by Jacob Hilber (1918–1985), a Swiss priest with the Catholic Church’s Bethlehem Mission, Kung Tung started with only two departments—carpentry and mechanical engineering. In 2002, the Department of Carpentry was closed because by that time many of the furniture factories in Taiwan had moved to mainland China and Southeast Asia, says Tsai Mao-fa (蔡茂發), the department’s director. However, after a 10-year hiatus, new courses were developed on such subjects as innovative thinking and computer graphics, and the department was reinstated in 2012 with a revised curriculum. The department has a total of 129 students for the 2014-2015 academic year, with 35 of them entering their third and final year of school.
On average, an experienced carpenter in Taiwan now charges NT$2,500 to NT$3,000 (US$83 to US$100) per day, according to Tsai. People with carpentry skills might also work as independent interior designers or as designers and managers for furniture factories, he adds. “Many people associate carpentry with manual labor, but the impression of this trade changes when the carpenter possesses creativity,” Kung Tung principal Lan Jen-fang (藍振芳) says of the significance of the updated curriculum.
During their final year starting in September 2013, 14 carpentry students at Yu Dong Junior High School in Hualien County, eastern Taiwan prepared for an exhibition of their works in June at Taipei’s Huashan Creative Park. Displaying carpentry craftwork around the time of graduation has become an annual highlight for the students in the carpentry course that the 45-year-old Wang Chia-na (王嘉納), a carpenter by training, began teaching at Yu Dong in 2008. The graduating carpenters of 2013 exhibited their works in a venue near Longshan Temple in Taipei, and the previous year the event was held in Hualien. This year’s Huashan Creative Park exhibition lasted 10 days and attracted more visitors than ever before, according to Wang. “The self-confidence of many students, which had been quite low due to poor academic performance, improved in the carpentry program,” Wang says. “About half of the students in the program this year will go on to Kung Tung’s Department of Carpentry and now feel more certain about their future careers.”
Lo Cheng-ming, right, instructs a student at Kung Tung Technical Senior High School. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
Name Recognition
The carpentry program at Yu Dong complies with measures formulated by the Ministry of Education (MOE) to enhance vocational skills among third-year junior high school students via programs that run for a limited time per week. In addition to carpentry, Yu Dong has a course on culinary skills, and each program is held for seven 50-minute periods every Friday. “Friday was the happiest day for me. I could do what I really love to do all day long,” says Yu Dong graduate Chen Jin-cheng (陳金城), who is now continuing his carpentry studies at Kung Tung.
Daxi Township in Taoyuan County, northern Taiwan was once renowned for its carpenters and furniture shops. As an important trading port for more than 100 years until the early 20th century, Daxi was a shipment point for top-grade imported woods such as ash, camphor and cypress as well as fine hard woods, and many woodworking artisans made their way to Daxi from mainland China to craft altars and dining tables. Jhih Shan Senior High School in Daxi is honoring this history by officially opening a carpentry program for the first time. According to Huang Yen-lin (黃彥霖), the director of the program, the school has recruited some 40 students for its first year. Huang is confident the new department will grow in name recognition, and that this will bring in more carpentry students in its second year. “Quite a few master carpenters expressed concerns about the lack of efforts to preserve their techniques, as few young people know about woodworking skills,” says Huang. With a master’s degree in cultural heritage conservation from National Yunlin University of Science and Technology in Douliu City, Yunlin County, central Taiwan, Huang has developed an interest in crafts and trades like carpentry that have fallen into decline. The founding of a department that focuses on this craft at Jhih Shan is encouraging to both him and the dwindling circle of local carpenters, some of whom have already been invited to teach at the school.
Still, carpentry remains a neglected trade to some degree—Kung Tung and Jhih Shan are the only senior high schools in Taiwan with a department focusing on the vocation. Yu Dong is also an exception, as few other junior high schools offer carpentry courses to students, and none is as famous for teaching such skills as Yu Dong. “People are starting to reflect on the phenomenon of everyone seeking scholastic achievement in standard schools, which makes knowledge gained from hands-on experience all the more valuable,” says Yang Qyong-jun (楊瓊竣), Kung Tung’s dean of academic affairs.
As the leader in technical and vocational tertiary education in Taiwan, National Taipei University of Technology (NTUT) in Taipei City is playing a key role in the emerging trend to nurture talent in carpentry. The ambition of the university to help revive the trade was mainly fueled by a newspaper story Yao Leeh-ter (姚立德), the president of NTUT, came across last year. It was about an old carpenter in southern Taiwan bemoaning the decline of the vocation and expressing his wish to found a school to reverse the trend. Deeply touched by the story, Yao vowed to realize the carpenter’s dream through the formal education system. For years NTUT and other technical universities around Taiwan have been commissioned by the MOE to provide junior high school students and their parents with information and guidance on vocational education. NTUT has also encouraged technical colleges and universities to evaluate the vocational and technical skills of freshman students during the recruitment process. Now the university is promoting education in technical skills, which the school hopes will prompt a resurgence in the carpentry industry.
Students practice skills in the carpentry workshop at Yu Dong Junior High School, Hualien County, eastern Taiwan. (Photo courtesy of Omexey Enterprise Co.)
These efforts involve establishing a trade cluster where carpenters will be encouraged to accumulate hands-on experience as they learn and work together. They will even be able to earn a master’s degree in the field, which will be the first of its kind in Taiwan. Officially announced in late May this year, the Wood Arts Creative Park in Dongshih District of Taichung City, central Taiwan, is a joint effort by NTUT and Yuen Foong Yu Inc., with the university providing the teaching staff and the paper manufacturing company the land resources and spaces converted from decommissioned factories. “Young people rely a lot on the Internet to gain knowledge and develop creative power, but this park will enable you to use your hands to actually create things,” says NTUT secretary general Thomas Yang (楊重光). “People talk about creativity and design skills all the time, but there is a lack of hands-on experience. This produces a gap between a good design on paper and the product that you actually can make according to the design,” Yang adds, explaining the significance of the park’s inception.
Cultivation of creative human resources is the park’s top task. There will be training courses in carpentry for interested people at different levels of proficiency. Master’s degree seekers will be able to enroll in a program that will allow them to hone their carpentry skills while also acquiring knowledge in other areas such as managerial know-how. Yang says that the program will be launched in just two years, noting that NTUT is very experienced at opening programs that target specific sectors in this manner, which helps develop human resources that are equipped with highly specialized knowledge.
NTUT has long offered carpentry education as part of the curricula in the Department of Industrial Design and Graduate Institute of Innovation and Design. The steps taken by NTUT to promote carpentry in higher education by building the Dongshih park and offering a master’s degree program in the field have helped nurture high hopes for a revival of the trade. “Representatives from various related sectors came to attend the official announcement of the park, from the wood processing industry to wooden toys manufacturing. They feel greatly inspired by the park’s birth,” Yang said.
All the same, Kung Tung carpentry teacher Lo Cheng-ming (羅正明) thinks more has to be done to educate prospective carpenters, calling for an adjustment in the curriculum for vocational high school students. At present, students are limited to eight periods per week of hands-on skills training, which is in line with MOE guidelines for vocational schools. “This isn’t enough. That’s why other teachers and I have to set aside time outside normal school hours to help interested students improve their skills,” Lo says. The MOE is taking into account suggestions given by professionals like Lo and his fellow teachers as it plans to allow vocational senior high schools to assign more time for skills training during regular school hours. The relevant details have yet to be revealed, but the new curriculum is scheduled to be announced in 2016 and implemented in 2018.
Carpentry students from Yu Dong Junior High School exhibit their works in Taipei City in June this year. (Photo by Huang Chung-hsin)
Yu Dong Junior High School carpenter-turned-teacher Wang echoes Lo’s sentiments. He feels that vocational students should be perfecting their technical skills prior to tertiary education, as it is best for students to focus on academic subjects such as the study of color and form theory after finishing high school. Wang also laments his carpentry program at Yu Dong failing to win sufficient support from the local government—a mere NT$20,000 (US$670) was granted to cover the cost of materials for the 2014 exhibition at Huashan Creative Park, while the actual cost was about 10 times this amount. The teacher had to look to private donors to cover the difference.
This lack of funding does not surprise Yang, who notes that Taiwanese society still tends to value scholastic achievements over technical skills. “The vast majority of junior high schools in Taiwan still encourage their graduating students to go to senior high schools offering standard courses,” the NTUT official says of his experience interacting with school authorities around Taiwan. “And that’s because Taiwanese parents want their children to go to a standard senior high school instead of a vocational one.”
Nevertheless, Wang’s efforts to cultivate young talent and publicly exhibit his students’ carpentry work have definitely paid off, as he has begun to receive support from a number of individual and corporate sponsors such as Omexey Enterprise Co., a Taipei-based firm that designs and manufactures home furnishing goods. A charitable foundation established by Omexey covered the costs this year of hauling the students’ craftwork and display materials from Hualien to Taipei and helped get publicity for the exhibition. “Carpentry talent has decreased in Taiwan over the years, but the creative woodworking of these students [at the Taipei exhibition] is truly encouraging,” says Shen Ying (沈盈), chief executive of the foundation, which also arranged for the students to visit several furniture companies and entrepreneurs while they were in Taipei.
With the establishment of the Wood Arts Creative Park, NTUT’s Yang also has good reason to anticipate a rosy future for Taiwan’s furniture and woodworking industries. “Hopefully Taiwanese operations in the industry that moved abroad seeking cheaper labor will return to take advantage of local talent, whose creativity is only growing,” he says. In the long term, he says, a domestic furniture brand that caters to global demands in the manner of Sweden’s IKEA could be established in Taiwan. Starting with the boost from formal education that carpentry has received at a few schools, a renewal in the field may emerge in Taiwan that provides not just a wealth of woodcraft to the nation and the world but a growth in related industries that can help invigorate the country’s economy and increase employment.
Write to Oscar Chung at mhchung@mofa.gov.tw