When Wang Gan returned to Beijing in 1999 with a PhD in anthropology from Yale, she never imagined that she would go on to launch a successful private kindergarten.
Then aged 31, she had an infant son, Dangdang, in tow. As he turned three, the boy began clamouring to attend kindergarten like all the other children in the neighbourhood. Wang spent weeks checking out potential nursery schools, but none came close to what she had in mind: a place that would rouse his curiosity and train him to think for himself.
'Many kindergartens still believe that teaching primary school material and piling kids with homework are the right things to do,' Wang says.
Rather than resign herself to the situation, Wang set up the Little Oak Children's House with 400,000 yuan (HK$492,000) in start-up capital. She began in a rented flat in 2001 with three teachers and six pupils, including her son.
'We see children as small trees with intrinsic potential, and adults are here to provide the right condition for them to grow,' she says.
Word spread through satisfied parents and before long, Wang was renting a second flat to house the swelling numbers. By 2004, they had outgrown the premises and moved to their current two-storey premises. There are now 180 children aged two to six years.
Pupils there are encouraged to share and to learn through play. To nurture an interest in numbers, for instance, teachers have designed a scoring system that assigns different points to foods that the children eat and they are asked to work out how many points they have gained at the end of the day. (Vegetable dishes usually have higher ratings.)