Changing Lifestyles : Korea Teaches Respect for Trades--and Makes It Pay Off : More than 100,000 technicians graduate each year, bucking a Confucian tradition that glorifies intellectual pursuits.

Born and raised on an island where his father farmed, fished and gathered seaweed, Kim Young Kyu went to work at 15 as an unskilled construction worker. His parents couldn’t afford to send him to high school.

At work in Pusan, he heard of a vocational training institute that was operated with aid from then-West Germany. Tuition was free.

“It was my last chance” to escape a life of poverty, Kim said. “Since I couldn’t go to high school, I thought I at least had to obtain a skill.”

So poor that he didn’t have enough money to pay a dormitory fee of $8.80 a month, Kim turned to his eldest brother, a clerk in a local government office in Pusan. The brother paid the fee for him--and helped transform Kim’s life.

Today, Kim earns $23,000 a year and symbolizes the success of a two-decade-old government program to nurture technicians and, in a country where Confucian tradition has always given top glory to intellectual pursuits, to make skills a source of pride. Indeed, without the program, South Korea could not have achieved growth rates that rank among the world’s highest, experts say.

The effort produces more than 100,000 technicians every year--and is South Korea’s answer to the kind of worker training problems that President Clinton is trying to tackle in the United States.

Starting from scratch around 1970, Seoul has now established 126 technical high schools, 18 mechanical high schools and 42 vocational institutes throughout the country. Free compulsory education ends at the sixth grade in South Korea, but tuition is waived at many of the vocational institutes and is vastly cheaper at rural technical and mechanical high schools than at regular academic high schools.

It was a vocational institute that gave Kim the basics, while the Skill Olympics--a biannual global competition in 33 technical fields such as welding, woodworking and engineering design--made him a star.

After learning his trade at the institute, Kim landed a job at a Gold Star Tele-Electric plant. Three years later, he was crowned the world’s top 21-or-younger precision instrument maker at the 1981 Skill Olympics in Atlanta.

Now married and the father of a girl, 7, and a boy, 5, Kim, 33, has since left Gold Star for a tiny, 12-employee plant in Gunpo where he is in charge of injection molding. Launched just two years ago, the factory sold $380,000 worth of precision machinery last year. He makes nearly six times as much as he did after the raise he got from Gold Star for winning his 1981 gold medal, and his former employer is one of the new firm’s best customers.

Whang Soon Chul, 33, a 1981 Skill Olympics gold medal winner in engineering design, also wanted to improve himself, quitting Gold Star to obtain the college education that his parents were too poor to give him and his three brothers. A graduate of a vocational high school, Whang used a separation payment from Gold Star and a scholarship that the government offers all Skill Olympics medal winners to acquire a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.

Now he is his own boss, drawing blueprints for machinery in a 6th-floor walk-up office in southern Seoul. He started in 1990, employs one assistant and even in slow months earns at least $2,000, he said.

“I could use two more assistants right now,” he said.

Despite such success stories, Koreans say the enthusiasm for skills training that the government of the late President Park Chung Hee whipped up during his 1961-79 rule is evaporating as South Korea gets more wealthy.

“No longer do International Skill Olympics medal winners meet the president. The confetti-doused parades through the streets of Seoul that welcomed home medalists no longer are held. And coverage by the mass media is only a tenth of what it used to be,” Whang said.

Nonetheless, no decline has occurred in the last decade in the number of new technicians trained each year.

According to Park Yong Soon, a teacher at the Chung Su Vocational Training Institute in Seoul, welders start out at a salary of about $9,000 a year, or the same as a white-collar worker. And “after three years, they earn more than we instructors with 10 years’ experience.

“A first-class plumber will charge $125 a day--and you have to provide him food, cigarettes and drinks,” Park added. “Even at that, plumbers are extremely hard to find. I get them to come to my home by doing wood-processing, interior-design work for them in exchange for their plumbing services,” Park said.

Competition to get into the Chung Su institute has dropped from its peak of five applicants for each slot in the 1970s but remains at a 3-to-1 ratio. And the ranks of the institute’s “stars” continue to grow.

Photographs of 154 Chung Su winners of national-level Skill Olympics medals dating back to 1977 are displayed in the institute’s entrance way. Twenty-five graduates also have won international gold medals--two in the most recent competition in 1991.

Still, precision machinery expert Kim said he believes South Korea’s technology lags far behind Japan’s. “Sometimes we develop a new machine and then discover that Japan already has been using the same thing for 10 to 15 years,” he said.

Whang, however, said that in machinery design, Japanese are now farming out their work to Koreans like himself.

“The significance of vocational training to the Korean economy is beyond description,” Park said.

“European countries trained technicians as far back as the Middle Ages with apprentice systems,” the teacher noted. “Japan was strong enough technically to start (World War II). But in Korea, because of the influence of Confucianism, vocational training was neglected. If we hadn’t started it in the 1970s, our economy would be chaos today.”

The effect on personal lives, too, has been immeasurable.

“If I hadn’t gone to that vocational school, I probably would be running a fish farm and raising seaweed today,” Kim said.

When Kim brought home his International Skill Olympics medal 12 years ago, he won $14,705 in prize money contributed by South Korea’s president and his employer, Gold Star--and gave it all to the brother who paid his dormitory fee at the Pusan training institute.

Whang married the longtime sweetheart he was dating in 1981. She waited eight years, including the four years he spent at college when she “helped support me--by giving me money to buy noodles,” he said.

Now the couple have a boy, 3, and a girl, 1, and Whang found the financial leeway to help finance his younger brother’s education at a commercial high school. He also gave his widowed mother a small condominium that he bought with his 1981 Skill Olympics prize money.

Park, 38, himself a vocational high school graduate, said, “It’s pretty certain that without the government scholarships offered under this system, I would not have been able to go to college.

“I probably would have gone to work at some simple job in a factory, without a skill, and would have been uncertain of my future,” he said.

Instead, after obtaining a bachelor’s degree in construction engineering at night school, Park is now working on a master’s degree in technical education.