AVOCADO AND THE EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

By Dexter Amoroso

Let me share a conversation I had with my wife. It goes like this…

Wife: “Can you grow an avocado tree in a small yard?”

Me: “Yes. My favorite professor in Education has avocado tree at her home. And it produces lots of
fruits.”

Wife: “How much yield can you expect?”

Me: “According to google it is possible for an avocado tree to produce 200 to 300 fruit per tree once
it is about 5 to 7 years of age. There are lots of variables which will influence this.”

Wife: “When do they ripen?”

Me: “They mature on the tree, but ripen off the tree. They are picked green, hold reasonably well,
and ripening can be controlled.”
The problem is in knowing when do you harvest avocados? It isn’t always easy to discern the peak
avocado harvest time. Are there some peak avocado harvesting time tips and how to pick an
avocado that is ripe?

That’s all interesting to me, because I think of how this all applies to education. In this society,
educational stages are subdivisions of formal learning, typically covering early childhood education,
primary education, secondary education and tertiary (or higher) education and are held to certain
expectations based on their age or level. They should be able to do certain things by a particular age,
and if they cannot or do not want to, they are seen as different and may even be diagnosed with
some disorder.

During the past century, as our population grew, a shift occurred in the process of educating our
children. We transitioned from a society in which children learned job skills primarily from their
parents and neighbours to a context in which education became the domain of governmental
agencies. With this transition came a subtle but significant shift in the valuation of skills. The three
R’s (readin’, ritin’, and ‘rithmetic) became the central theme of education, and other skills (e.g.,
culinary arts, cosmetology, fine arts, music, farming, and the construction trades) were largely
devalued and removed from mainstream education. Over the years, the emphasis on language arts
and mathematics has dominated educational centers, culminating in the present federal policy (No
Child Left Behind), in which children must demonstrate mastery of English, science, social studies,
and mathematics in order to attain a high school diploma.

The impact of such policy on children, whose gift lies not so much in putting ideas on paper but in
translating ideas into the creation of the physical world in which we live, is well documented. We
now live in a society in which children whose attention is not drawn to the world of books are
diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder. Children whose brains were built to invent and design
are labelled as disabled in the areas of reading, writing, and mathematics, rather than identified as
gifted for their creativity and innovation. Without the support and collaboration of educators and
parent-advocates, these children are at increased risk to “drop out of school,” engage in criminal
activities, become addicted to drugs and alcohol, engage in a variety of high-risk activities, and live
with a sense of inadequacy and incompetence, because they struggled to learn how to read, write,
and learn advanced mathematics.

Now, children are not avocados. However, like avocados, children all “ripen” at different rates. They
acquire skills and skill sets differently from child to child. Like the avocados that ripen at different
rates, some children start walking at 10 months; some kids at 14 months or even 18 months. From
18 to 24 Months. Most (but not all) toddlers can say about 20 words by 18 months and 50 or more
words by the time they turn 2. By age 2, children are starting to combine two words to make simple
sentences, such as "Toby crying" or "Neo hungry."
There is nothing wrong with what some individuals differing from all other members of society or
group or set. We call it "outliers" in Inferential Statistics class. They simply deviate from the norm,
which is often an arbitrary set of expectations based on what is most convenient or expedient for
institutionalization.

And, this only becomes a problem when children are separated into groups according to an
arbitrary small piece of data that is used to define them: their age. If this same standard were used
to avocados, people might say there was something wrong with the avocados that stayed green
while the other ones turned brown. And, they might say that the early brown-turning avocados were
“gifted.” No. They’re just avocados being avocados. Ripening at their own rate for their own reasons.
And, they are ALL delicious, healthy when they have been allowed to fully ripen in their own time.
That's why labelling a child, whether the label sounds good or bad, is wrong.