Never Too Old: Meet the 77-year-old preschool founder who still takes parents on school tours
In the second part of a series on elderly who choose to spend their golden years working, CNA speaks to early childhood education pioneer Dr Khoo Kim Choo, who started her first preschool at the age of 60.
Dr Khoo Kim Choo, founder and director of the Preschool for Multiple Intelligences, trims some leaves in PMI By The Woods, a centre near MacRitchie. (Photo: CNA/Jeremy Long)
This audio is generated by an AI tool.
SINGAPORE: Some people retire when they become grandparents so they can spend more time with their grandchildren. Dr Khoo Kim Choo, 77, took a different approach – she started a preschool.
“I couldn’t find a preschool that I would be confident to put my own grandson in,” said Dr Khoo, a pioneer of early childhood education in Singapore.
So, in the year she turned 60, when others may have been thinking of retiring, she entered a new phase of her career.
“It never occurred to me how old I was,” she said. The first Preschool for Multiple Intelligences (PMI) centre was set up in 2006, the same year her first grandson Matthew was born.
Still, Dr Khoo continued running the school, opened a second centre in Kembangan in 2011 and a third centre near MacRitchie in 2021.
“I’m not a business person, but I went with it because of my love for children,” she said.
Eighteen years later, Dr Khoo remains actively involved. From bringing food for the children when a cook at one centre could not show up for work, to opening the school gate in the morning when manpower is tight – “bao ga liao”, she said, using the Hokkien phrase which means to do everything.
Day-to-day operations are managed by each centre’s teachers, but Dr Khoo steps in as needed.
“Whether it’s to do with maintenance or whether it is to do with sanitising – whatever is needed at that point in time, I’ll have to do it,” she said.
She also tries to be at one of the centres in the morning when the children arrive so that she can welcome them and speak to their parents.
“Parent engagement is very important to me because the child is with us for at most six years, but they’re with their parents for the rest of their lives.
“It’s important that they understand me, and that I understand them as well – where they are coming from, what the child is like at home, and what the child is like in school.”
One grandparent told CNA that Dr Khoo puts the children at ease. “She makes them feel comfortable even if they are in a bad mood when they reach the school,” the grandparent said.
EVERY CHILD IS INTELLIGENT
Before starting PMI, Dr Khoo had a storied career, including volunteer work overseas and serving as NTUC Childcare’s first chief executive officer.
She taught trainers in Vietnam with the Singapore International Foundation and improved conditions at preschools in the mountains, rallying parents to build a swing and sandpit using wooden beams and tires.
As an early childhood consultant with humanitarian aid organisation UNICEF, she also went to Mongolia, Romania and Myanmar.
In Singapore, she spent 16 years with NTUC Childcare, where she started professional training for early childhood educators and helped set up Little Skool-House preschools, which were meant to cater to middle-income families.
After leaving the organisation, she joined the National University of Singapore’s (NUS) social work department as an adjunct professor. That’s when she started looking into American psychologist Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, which inspired the name of her brand of preschools.
The theory states that there are eight types of intelligences and a person might have a high level of one intelligence and lower levels of others.
The eight intelligences are logical-mathematical, linguistic, visual-spatial, musical, intrapersonal, interpersonal, bodily-kinaesthetic and naturalistic.
Traditional intelligence quotient (IQ) tests measure strength in logical-mathematical and linguistic intelligence, according to Gardner. Someone with naturalistic intelligence may be able to distinguish plants, animals or cloud configurations more easily.
Dr Khoo first started using this theory when teaching social work students at NUS.
“They always think that social workers are kind of average or so-so, not really that intelligent. But when I got them to do an analysis of the other intelligences, they felt like, hey, I’m actually quite intelligent in this area,” she said.
“I felt like it really made them see themselves at a higher level, and they were more confident of themselves.”
That, she feels, is important for everyone, including children. The starting point should be that every child is intelligent, she said.
Her belief in the theory of multiple intelligences shows up in PMI’s centres and programmes.
The centre in MacRitchie has a nature corner with seashells, small rocks, abandoned bird nests and more for children to learn and play. The same piece of wood could look like different things to each child, and allows them to exercise their imagination, she said.
“If you eat vongole, remember to bring the shells here,” she told teachers in the school. Vongole is a pasta dish with clams in it.
She also engages external instructors – specialising in things like nature or music and drama – to help the children develop their different intelligences.
On a recent excursion to MacRitchie Reservoir, the nature educator known to the children as Uncle Andrew pointed out various creatures, referring to one as a “golden backside ant” and encouraging the children to use magnifying glasses to take a closer look at a millipede along the path.
AGE IS JUST A NUMBER
During the walk, the younger children tire before Dr Khoo does. After all, she still keeps an active lifestyle, including brisk walking around 3,000 steps on weekdays. On weekends, she aims for 5,000 to 10,000 steps.
Every morning, she also does exercises from a book that she said “literally dropped into my hands when I was in a bookshop”.
Called the Ancient Secret of the Fountain of Youth, it is based on five exercises that Tibetan monks used to do. They include stretching your arms out to the sides and spinning up to 21 times, and leaning backwards while kneeling on the floor.
“I am thankful that I am generally a very healthy person, I don’t fall sick,” she said.
How healthy you are and what you enjoy is more important than your age, Dr Khoo said.
“It’s just a number,” she said. “Once you think about it, then the stereotype comes in. You think okay, now that you’re going to be 80, the big eight-zero, now you’re 77 or whatever it is. What are you going to do? Go to a nursing home?”
She added that she still has many passions to pursue.
“I love gardening, so I don’t only mess around with my own garden, I also do the gardening at (some of the centres),” she said.
When the time comes for her to stop working at PMI, she won’t see it as retirement.
“It doesn’t mean sit back, relax, drink tea, that sort of thing. It’s so boring,” she said.
Instead, she will see it as moving on to other things that she wants to pursue, such as art, music and writing. Dr Khoo has written several children’s books, but she saw that as a duty because there were not many local authors of children’s books.
She also started to learn the keyboard and ukelele but did not have time to practice.
“I think this is probably the last phase (of my career and life) where children are concerned,” she said. “The next phase will be more for myself.”
Asked when that next phase of life may begin, Dr Khoo did not have an exact answer.
“I will know when it comes.”
