Leaving No One Behind

Cartier Women's Initiative 2023 Fellow Mint Lim on expanding her award-winning and inclusive brand of education to Malaysia

- Tania Jayatilaka

“Please don’t be offended...I’m not looking into your eyes directly but actually concentrating on your eyebrows as we’re talking,” Mint Lim says candidly, adding that she has dyslexia and that people with learning differences often have unique challenges to overcome when it comes to learning and interacting. “It’s sometimes hard for me to handle that emotional presence, because in my mind, I’m going part by part on this formula in my head while speaking, otherwise I might sound incoherent,” she says with a winsome grin.

Lim is the founder of the School of Concepts, an educational institution in Singapore that teaches English and Chinese literacy as well as STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics) proficiency through an innovative visual/auditory/kinesthetic learning methodology. By rethinking how different children learn and encouraging their unique optimal learning style, the School of Concepts lives up to its mission of leaving no child behind.

“In school, I didn’t understand what was going on,” Lim recalls. “I started thinking that the people around me were very smart, and so I must be either really dumb or really slow. When exams kicked in, my low scores didn’t help. Thankfully, my parents never believed that I was less than anyone else. My dad once told me, ‘It’s okay if people take one year to do something that takes you five years to do. You will still get there,’” she says. “That built grit in me. That’s why I am here today. I learned to realise that it doesn’t matter; we can still get to that end goal.”