Family & Life Magazine Issue 14 | Page 8

FOCUS e if L 40 Begins at For Grace Yong, it was only after four decades and four children that she discovered what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. Discover how this business-trained lady is now one of the fastest rising names in pre-school education. It’s not every day that your parents, lovely as they may be, would call you mad, perhaps even downright bonkers. That was the exact adjective Grace’s mother used when she found out that Grace was about to embark on an academic journey to complete her Master’s degree in education, just after the birth of her fourth child, with James Cook University. Grace professes that her mother had every reason to label her crazy – the senior Yong had offered to fund her daughter’s Master’s degree education in business back when she just graduated with a Bachelor’s degree but Grace declined. “I was sick of studying already,” explains Grace, laughing. Instead, Grace decided that it was time to find work. There was only one problem though – she had no idea what she wanted to do. More than a decade’s worth of education had taught her everything she needed to know about the world but nothing about herself. She might have been the combined product of two of the country’s most esteemed academic institutions at that time – Raffles Girls’ Secondary School and National University of Singapore – but all that pedigree only amounted to two paper certificates and a seemingly dull and murky future, made even worse by the economic downturn happening at that time. THE TWISTS AND TURNS Grace Yong is the founder and current principal of Character Montessori, and is the first certified Singaporean Character Education Practitioner, accredited by The Abraham Lincoln Centre for Character Development (USA). Grace also holds a Master in Education from James Cook University. Grace ended up working as a communications executive in the humanitarian aid organisation World Vision. The year was 1985, a time before the advent of the Internet and powerful computers and when almost everything had to be done by hand. Grace thrived in the environment, absorbing everything that was happening around her. “It was only when I started working that I started discovering who I really was and where my passions lay,” says Grace. She enjoyed learning about the human condition; her work required her to meet people from different backgrounds and walks of life. And while life would give her other career opportunities, her enthusiasm for learning about the motivations of people continued to grow, even after marriage and children. It was only when her children started going to pre-school that her passion would begin to crystallise into something resembling destiny. “My children would go to pre-school and 8 Family & Life • Christmas 2014 come back still unable to read or do math,” shares Grace. So, she had to take it upon herself to educate her children and prepare them for the rigours of primary school, not only giving them an academic foundation but carving their characters and moral fibre. Some might say that a toddler is far too young to be able to learn about the world around them but Grace begs to differ. “Many adolescent problems can be traced back to the period when that teenager was three,” says Grace. She further contends that the most appropriate time to shape a person’s worldview and teach him or her the correct values is between birth and five. Her passion for children and education was what led her to pursue that Master’s degree in education, the one that caused her mother much consternation. DESTINY AWAITS At the age of 40, Grace had finally decided what she wanted to do in life, 20 years after university and after riding a roller-coaster of jobs across different industries. She was going to set up a pre-school, a place that would give young children the character education they need to become morally upright forces in the world. It was an ambitious business undertaking, made even harder by the fact that Grace had a family – four children at impressionable ages Words Farhan Shah Photos Glenn Lim (12, 10, eight and two) – to raise. Fortunately, her tireless dedication to build a solid foundation in her children paid off in spades during this period. “We created a culture of independence at home backed by a set of rules and in-house teachers’ training programmes. For instance, I told them that I’m not supposed to get complaints from teachers about h