GUARDIANS OF CURIOSITY

Ask Le Yi Khor what rule she's breaking, and her answer begins with a quiet rebellion against efficiency.

- LE YI KHOR

“The moment you push for efficiency too early — before a child has had the chance to explore a topic freely — you do it at the direct cost of their natural curiosity,” she says. “Efficiency has its place, but that place is much later, during the mastery phase, not at the very beginning of the journey.”

In her telling, curiosity is not a luxury. It is survival. The founder of Ottodot, a learning platform built through games, argues that in an economy defined by rapid shifts, the only absolute job security is the ability to keep learning. “If my company vanished tomorrow, the gap would still remain,” she explains. “We would be preparing a generation to be left behind. The pace of change today means the only real job security is the ability to learn constantly. If you don’t have that internal drive, you become obsolete.”

That drive, she insists, is seeded in childhood. The spark of curiosity — a willingness to ask “why?” and “what if?” — is fragile, easily extinguished by systems that reward correct answers over exploration. Khor sees her work as an act of protection: shielding that spark from premature standardisation, and letting it grow into confidence.