About wonder
A deepening question, not a linear career.
The story of Wonder begins with a diagnosis — and a refusal to look away from what that diagnosis demands.
Founder Story
Dr Catherine Ho — economist, educator, researcher.
CWO — Chief Wonderer Officer
Dr Ho didn’t set out to found an organisation. She set out to understand something that was bothering her — a feeling, sitting in classrooms and staffrooms across Asia, that education was producing the wrong kind of person. Not a bad person. A constrained one. A person shaped, without knowing it, by a story they hadn’t chosen.
That intuition sent her back to university — not as a teacher this time, but as a researcher. Her doctoral work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign named what she’d been sensing for years: a single economic story had shaped teachers’ common sense so quietly, so thoroughly, that they could no longer see the assumptions running their classrooms. They weren’t failing their students. They were failing to see the frame.
Wonder: Education Reimagined was built on the back of that research — and the stubborn belief that epistemic recovery is possible. That teachers who can name the story can begin to rewrite it. And that students in classrooms led by those teachers have a fighting chance of becoming the genuinely critical global citizens our world so urgently needs.
Our Mission
Why Wonder exists.
Wonder seeks to empower people and organisations to recover epistemic sight — becoming aware of the unseen and often false economic narratives that pervade our world — reviving hope and turning understanding into purposeful action that helps create a better and more peaceful world.
Wonder believes we must leverage privilege for the flourishing of all.
TINA — There Is No Alternative — is not true. And wonder exists to prove it.
The Research
From classroom to dissertation to framework.
Wonder’s research investigated how neoliberal ideology shapes teachers’ pedagogical assumptions — and whether structured critical inquiry can disrupt it. The finding was clear, and uncomfortable: most educators carry economic assumptions they have never examined, and those assumptions quietly govern what they teach, how they assess, and whose knowledge they value.
The research didn’t stop at diagnosis. It produced a tool: the DISRUPT thinking routine — a seven-stage framework for deconstructing economic narratives embedded in curricula, policies, and everyday classroom assumptions. Developed with educators through intentionalist orientational qualitative inquiry, DISRUPT is wonder’s centrepiece methodology.
Why Wonder?
A century later, something has gone badly wrong.
Education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform.
John Dewey, 1916
Education has been captured by a different story — one where learning is a private investment, credentials are the currency, and competition is the natural state of things.
Students are anxious. Teachers are exhausted. And the very young people who will need to navigate — and change — the most unequal world in recorded history are being prepared only to succeed within it.
Wonder exists because we believe that naming this story is the first step to rewriting it. And that a sense of genuine wonder — curiosity, care, and the audacity to imagine otherwise — is the most radical thing education can offer.
The Velvet Cage
The cage isn't iron.
It is lined with velvet.
The name began as a metaphor — and became something more. Max Weber spoke of an iron cage: the cold, hard constraints of modern bureaucratic life that trap people without their knowing. But Wonder’s research suggested something different.
The cage isn’t iron. It isn’t harsh or obvious. It is lined with velvet — comfortable, well-intentioned, beautiful even. International schools with their warm communities and caring teachers and carefully designed curricula. And inside this cage, something essential is quietly closed off: the ability to see the frame.
The Velvet Cage is the condition of our world today. It is also the reason Wonder exists. Not to tear the cage down in anger, but to help people see it — and then, together, to choose something better.
Note: The research was first titled “Dismantling the Iron Cage of Neoliberalism” — but at the doctoral defence, the committee agreed that the iron cage does not connote the hope that it could be dismantled, nor is it accurate to lived reality. ‘Velvet Cage’ was born from that conversation. Big thanks to Professor Nick Burbules.
Theory of Change
From Degeneration to Regeneration.
The dominant economic stories we inherit shape a degenerative world — and education, as currently designed, largely reproduces them. Competition is treated as natural. Learning is measured as individual output. Students are prepared for a world they are not equipped to question.
When educators recover the capacity to SEE and QUESTION those stories through Critical Economic Literacy, they create the conditions for something different: learning that reconnects students to curiosity, to community, and to care — and invites them to RE-MEMBER what education is truly for.
Team Wonder
The people behind the work.
Wonder is a collaborative. We are educators/researchers/facilitators who bring it to life — each bringing our distinct set of expertise, with a shared belief that a better world starts with better questions.
Dr. Polly Clayton
Founder, With Intent Education · Bioengineering background
Global Citizenship Education · Curriculum Design · Systems Thinking · Sustainability
Polly is an educator whose career traces an unusual and productive arc — from bioengineer to mathematics teacher to global citizenship leader. As Director of Global Citizenship at Dulwich College Singapore, she built a Global Citizenship Education curriculum spanning Early Years to IBDP. She is a Global Schools Advocate for the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
Through With Intent Education, Polly works with schools and organisations to design curricula and learning experiences that actually do what they claim to — building the critical capacities students need for a complex and unequal world.
Dr. Valentina Zuin
Founder, Planet Impact Mosaic · PhD, Stanford University
Founder, Planet Impact Mosaic · PhD, Stanford University
Valentina holds a doctorate from Stanford University and has worked at the intersection of academic research, immersive education, and real-world impact across Singapore and beyond. She has taught at Yale-NUS College, bringing rigorous environmental and sustainability thinking into one of Asia’s most distinctive liberal arts environments.
Through Planet Impact Mosaic, Valentina helps organisations translate sustainability values into genuine learning practices and measurable change — not sustainability as a concept to understand, but as a practice to embody.
The Sammi
Project.
Wonder is not only an intellectual project. Behind the research and the frameworks is a deeply human motivation — a belief that every young person deserves an education shaped by care, not competition.
The Sammi Project is a children’s picture book introducing Critical Economic Literacy through story — illustrated by Marta Vilella. It is Wonder’s attempt to start this conversation earlier: at picture book age, with wonder, not worry.
Most stories end on the last page. This one doesn’t.
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