“I wanted to change the world!” In the offices of the Alliance Cultural Foundation, located in an old apartment building next to the Landis Tai­pei hotel, Stanley Yen chuckles as he thinks back on his younger self, filled with fearless, boundless ambition.

Yen, now in his 60s, long ago understood that no single person has the power to change the world, and today he has only one goal in mind: to reform education in Taiwan. He says things that others dare not say, boldly proclaiming that “two thirds of the departments in Taiwanese universities aren’t worth studying in.” He criticizes young people for the self-satisfaction they get by posting their feelings and photos on Facebook and getting “likes” from their friends, always staying within the comfort zone of their own little ponds and losing the ambition to face the ocean of life.

After leaving the post of CEO at one of Taipei’s most prestigious hotels, Stanley Yen vowed to dedicate himself to volunteer work in eastern Taiwan. On one occasion, he brought music teachers from the Ju Percussion Group to teach promising young percussionists, and also created a performance platform for them.

Four years ago Yen resigned as the CEO of the Tai­pei Landis and turned his attention from tourism to public service and education. He established the Alliance Cultural Foundation in order to do something for the environment of Hua­lien and Tai­tung, so badly damaged by Typhoon Morakot in August, 2009, and for the local children.

His daily schedule is as packed as ever, and his assistant frets every single day trying to get him to slow down a little. His life is not that different from when he was running a hotel, except that now his energies are being directed elsewhere.

“I am now 66. If you know that the time when you can exert some influence is waning, and you have had one kidney­ sliced away, you have to reduce and concentrate, take advantage of the moment when young people are not yet annoyed by you and are willing to listen to what you have to say, and go and do the thing you most want to do.” Yen is like a farmer who sees that his fields have dried up and his seedlings are withering.

He sees education as the answer.

“For many decades, education in Taiwan was like a huge ocean liner that was obviously headed straight for an iceberg, but we weren’t able to change direction and we plowed right into it.” Despite the warning raised by Yen’s book Education Should Be Different, the reality has remained unchanged. Therefore he decided to come to eastern Taiwan and get involved with Aboriginal communities set amid the beautiful natural scenery here.

Geographically isolated, growing up in poor or dysfunctional families, and subject to a distorted education system, kids here start with three strikes against them. Their life stories will end up being composed of one frustration and disappointment after another. Anxious to do something about this, Yen changed the direction of his own life and decided that this was the station where he was going to get off the train and focus his energies.

Hand-crafted works by Aboriginal artists displayed in the arts space in the Taitung Sugar Factory have become a major cultural feature for the region.

Stanley Yen has long been idolized by young people in Taiwan. His lectures are invariably packed out, and he knows how to use his influence for good.

In 1997 he wrote a book describing his process of growth from working for American Express Taiwan to becoming CEO of the Landis. He intended the book to be for young people, and he used it to communicate his management philosophy and life values. He especially wanted to give encouragement to people like himself who have no family connections or even a university diploma, to help them find their talents, build self-confidence, and carve out a piece of the action for themselves.

The book was an unexpected hit, with 600,000 copies sold. It seemed like everyone in society was waiting for him to turn his attention their way and give advice, waiting for Stanley Yen to rescue them from their difficulties. He recognized that his influence had grown far beyond what he had ever anticipated, and the pressure that came with it was like being crushed under a pile of boulders.

In the years thereafter, he often would go to speak at high schools and universities, where he saw countless young people swept up in the tide of “university for one and all.” The problem is, university was not a pathway to a good job, but just a way to put off working altogether. Many of these young people kept putting off graduation, or after graduation avoided working by going on to grad school. And what did it get them? When they finally left school and started looking for jobs they found no doors open to them, and many had to accept positions with very low starting salaries. He found the whole spectacle depressing.

He himself, equipped with nothing more than a high-school diploma, started out with a job as a “go-fer” at a foreign-owned firm, and within five years became the company’s general manager in Taiwan. At 32 he took over management of the Ritz Tai­pei, the forerunner to the Landis. There are no longer any legendary tales of meteoric rises of this kind among the younger generation.

At the Taitung Sugar Factory, visitors can take classes in hand-painting mugs or firing lazurite beads, to get a better understanding of ­Aboriginal culture.

It is true that because of the shelter and protection provided by the older generation, the current generation of young people have no need to mature at once. Nonetheless, the next generation will, in the end, have to live their own lives. They will have to learn for themselves how to absorb disappointments and failures. This is why Yen chose to transform himself into a life counselor, and lay out a set of formulas that will allow young people to examine themselves: from “discover your potential,” “train your brain,” and “search out your comparative advantage and look at the big picture,” to “communicate with the entire world” and “passion! passion! passion!”

He hopes that young people will seriously think about the meaning of work, and recognize that what defines a person is not power or wealth, but their life outside of work.

Unfortunately, education in Taiwan has always gone in the opposite direction. Yen discovered that he was taking on a deeply entrenched system of thought in which “only book learning is admirable.” The seeds for his book Education Should Be Different had been planted.

From godfather of tourism to life coach to the young, Yen’s every step has been closely followed, and no matter what waters he has fished in, every nugget of advice he has cast out has created ripples.

After 30 years in the world of tourism, Yen published The Future as I See It, a book that he defines as his “graduation thesis from the tourism and travel industry.” It incorporates all that he saw and learned on the front lines of the battle to get a high-quality leisure industry up and running in Taiwan, and the realizations he arrived at about his profession. He wrote it from the top-down perspective of grand strategy, aiming it at government agencies with decision-making power.

After this book was published, Yen went into the hospital “to have some minor surgery,” as he puts it. In fact, he had a tumor in one of his kidneys and had to have the kidney removed. Kidney tumors mainly occur in people who ask a lot of themselves, who go all out in everything they do, and who are under enormous pressure at work. The chief nurse gave him a stern warning: “Mr. Yen, you may think you have every­thing under control, but that’s not what your body is saying. Having lost one kidney, in the future you will have to be considerate to the one you have left, and change your lifestyle from top to bottom.”

A year later he published You Can Be Different: Stanley Yen and the Story of the Landis, giving the inside dope on the founding and success of the hotel. He dedicated the book to some of the major shareholders in the enterprise (the extended families of Zhou Zhi­rong and Lin You­cheng), to all of his colleagues and co-workers, and to all the individuals working quietly away, fulfilling their responsibilities, in ­every corner of society, whether professionally “successful” or not.

Pisirian Village and the Jimmy S.P.A. Company have cooperated to decorate the community with works by the well-known illustrator Jimmy.

After that he gave up his post at the Landis, and the “godfather of tourism” gracefully left the stage.

In 2011 he produced his discourse on education in Taiwan, Education Should Be Different. Unlike his previous books, this one was written with a sense of urgency and anxiety, and even an unprecedented attacking style. “You see the government willing to spend billions of NT dollars constructing new buildings and facilities at universities that already can’t recruit their full complement of students, creating nothing but a lot of unused space. But you don’t see the government willing to spend money where it’s needed most, hiring better teachers for disadvantaged children and doing more to cultivate their talents.”

At that point, Stanley Yen understood that his life had come to a turning point. He decided to take the “extra time” that fate had awarded him, like a second life, and donate it to eastern Taiwan and to the reform of education.

After six years in Tai­tung, the Alliance Cultural Foundation has “adopted” one department in each of four technical schools. One of them is the National Tai­tung University Affiliated Physical Education High School. Yen recognizes that this specialized high school, with more than 400 students, produces a lot of high-level athletes. But he also says that for many of these kids, their careers will flame out after only a few years or they will be knocked out by injury. What will they do then?

“If they don’t come out of school with a second skill, that’s not just unfair, it’s cruel. How can they have good lives when you don’t give them any tools?” Yen wonders.

A broad expanse of sea, a broad expanse of sky. Standing by the pristine coast, Stanley Yen seeks a way back home for himself and for the counties of eastern Taiwan.

Meanwhile, the core of Yen’s public interest work is the ­JunYi School for Innovative Learning. It is a demonstration school where his educational ideals are being turned into reality.

­JunYi, which covers grades one to nine, was founded by Fo ­Guang Shan, a Buddhist organization. After Yen took over as chairman, he immediately set to work trying to find donors to maintain the school’s operations, and at the same time radically transformed the traditional educational model, incorporating the Waldorf (or Steiner) method, which is completely alien to Taiwan’s educational structure. But there is a big difference in the way the method is applied at ­JunYi. Whereas Waldorf kids generally­ come from the middle class, the ideal at JunYi is 3–3–3: one third of the students will come from outside of eastern Taiwan, one third will be ordinary local children, and one third will be disadvantaged children.

There are three main orientations in curriculum design at JunYi: applied arts, eco-tourism, and advancement to higher levels of education. Yen expects that three years from now, the school will allow teachers from across the country to reside in the dorm and observe and absorb their methods. “If we do it right, we can tell the government that it is possible to have a livelier and more humane approach to education even within the existing structure.”

Yen has single-handedly taken responsibility for these education reforms, which you would think should be funded by the government. He wants to tell the government that education in Taiwan should be transformed from its current focus on examinations to an approach designed more to open students’ minds and provoke them into thinking for themselves, an approach in which they would learn how to ask questions and then seek out the answers themselves. He also wants schools to be places where students will gradually understand who they are as individuals and what their future options might be, so they can go on to find things they genuinely are interested in studying. These are the challenges confronting higher education in Taiwan today.

Yen has taken things a step further, suggesting to the Ministry of Education that the teaching materials developed at JunYi—once they have been tested and revised over a few years—can be made available to mainstream schools for reference, so that the JunYi experience can be disseminated.

Education is the future of Hualien and Taitung. The children’s enthusiasm­ for learning fires TACF volunteers with hope.

It was no secret to Stanley Yen that he had to give up the burdens of his business career. But then he simply turned around and took even more on his shoulders, turning onto a long, unpaved roadway with no visible end in sight. He set himself to reading everything he could find about “independent schools” of every type from all over the world.

“Why? Why would I do such a thing?” Is he so besieged by voices calling to him to correct injustices and rectify incorrect beliefs? Why has he never been able to resist speaking out and being critical about conditions that he finds unacceptable? Is he really such “an interfering do-gooder” that he can’t stop himself from minding other people’s business?

One day Yen analyzed himself, and wrote down the descriptions that he came up with: “incurable passion,” “never-say-die determination,” and “cool and clear-headed in thinking, with extraordinary powers of observation.”

To the extent that these characteristics are innate, Yen traces them back to his father: “I inherited my father’s genes, and his influence has been profound.”

Up until middle age, Yen’s father lived the unbridled life of a wastrel, but at age 54, when Stanley was just eight, he suddenly turned to religion, leaving home to become a monk. Although at his wife’s insistence he later returned home from the monastery, for the next 30 years Yen’s father essentially stayed at home and practiced religious self-­cultivation, and men of religion often visited their house.

Once, Yen’s father saw a story in the newspaper about factional infighting in connection with a temple event, and was so infuriated that he wrote letters to religious leaders complaining about disorder in the religious community. It was only many years later, when Yen happened to read these letters, that he realized how deeply his father felt about righting wrongs. “I am the heir to my dad’s genes, so I guess I’m just like him,” says Yen with a laugh.

The Alliance Cultural Foundation (TACF) has helped Long Huimei (left), founder of the Cotton & Hemp shop located in Taitung’s Donghe ­Township, to get a microloan and buy a storefront. Long teaches art to Aboriginal women, an example of a successful local cultural enterprise.

Yen recognized that within him there burns a missionary-like yearning to save the world—but his field of action has been the mundane, secular world.

And for him, it has always come back to education.

He says that children are the future, and it is essential to give young people hope and confidence. People can be ordinary, and in fact the majority are by the very definition of the word. But people should not be “mediocre.” It is through education, he avers, that these beliefs can be cultivated.

There is one story that Yen especially likes to tell, that he incorporates into every one of his lectures. It comes from the book The Happiness of the Poor, by the Korean author Ryu Si-hwa. Ryu went to India to seek out a guru and asked if he could become a disciple, if the guru would teach him the way to escape the pain of mundane life. The guru completely ignored him, until Ryu eventually decided to give up and return home. At that moment, the guru ran after him and told him three concepts to follow.

Concept 1: Have integrity. Even if you must compromise with everyone in the world, do not compromise with yourself. In this way, no one can manipulate you.

Concept 2: Remember that all feelings of happiness and sadness will disappear within a short time. There is nothing that does not change. In this way, no matter what happens, your internal tranquility will never disappear.

Concept 3: When others come to you for help, do not consider this to be a service to a deity, but help people with the mindset that no gods exist.

Yen has always kept these words of wisdom with him as he has rushed along the road of life. Although he is now in his autumn years, these are years when he can focus on one thing, concentrate all his will, empty himself, and bring to bear all his wisdom, connections, and wealth to selflessly help others.

There is still so much he wants to get done.

By bringing in international ideas and raising service standards, TACF has helped transform Taitung hostels. The photo shows the “Coconut Coast” hostel.

Students from the JunYi School for Innovative Learning roast pork at the Sazasa Forest Museum, learning traditional customs for ­welcoming honored guests to the community.

Education is the future of Hualien and Taitung. The children’s enthusiasm­ for learning fires TACF volunteers with hope.