> For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school.
I think this is can be hit/miss, I was in private school from k-8 grade and having such young children present can actually stunt your development. They tried to appease the 8th graders perceived level of maturity with a 'buddy system' wherein you're responsible to look after a Kindergartner. I shared a boy, who happened to have autism before it was well understood and diagnosed in children in the 90s, with a girl in my class and he was the child of a teacher on campus. I believe she was at one point my 5th grade teacher.
It was very awkward to say the least, because, first: I had no interest in pretending to be a faux-parent with this girl in my class with a child not my own, a girl who I had known for the better part of 6 years and it gave me a taste of how ill-prepared I'd be in raising children and how little interest I had in it. Second, I had even less desire to have to check in with the mother of this child on matters that pertained to what I could and couldn't say/do around this child due to his condition, and ultimately it just revealed that he clearly needed better care-taking skills than any 8th graders could provide. In a way it was reason to justify good birth-control practices, but that was hardly the aim, as I wouldn't see the value in mentoring younger minds until my late 20s to early 30s.
All this really did was make me look deeper into the propensity of autism in children due to paternal aging, and it made me make efforts to freeze my sperm from 29 onward to try and avoid this possibility in my children as much as I could as after 35 the rates of autism due to the father's age goes up significantly. Later as a cell biologist I came to learn about the many benefits of opting for in-vitro fertilization, versus in-vivo, to be able to detect for other maladies in the embryo, with the main issue being the ever increasing cost(s) associated with it so I decided to pro-long having children well it into my 50s in hopes of technologies that would drop the costs significantly.
However, when I was in Europe working on farms in my mid to late 20s it was typical for the children to be treated like adults from a very young age as they had to participate not just in school matters, but also had a vital role to fill on the farm's daily operations.
To this day I have never seen such mature children in my entire life as I did when I lived and worked on a farm in the base of the Bernese Alps. These 3 children (ages 5-11) not only ate everything on their plates without any coaxing, including the vegetables they often helped grow in the fields, but also they took on chores cleaning the kitchen and feeding, herding, and milking the cows, before and after their school work and spoke to each other in such a way that made you think that these children, who still behaved like children when playing outside, were behaving more like they were in their mid to late teens.
It was astonishing to see a 5 year old girl reminding the older kids to make sure they did their homework as she helped them get ready for school, and as she walked them to the bus stop several Km away from Home at 6am and then came back, dressed herself to then worked in the greenhouse for a few hours alongside me and her Mother. It still baffles me when I think about it.
It's hard to explain, and I think this more a Nurture thing then it is a Nature thing, in my experience. I entered HS at 13, and to be honest if things were not done to prevent me from it I would have entered at 12, and the idea of going into that system at that age would have been entirely disastrous because I was still unprepared and perhaps infantile in many ways about most things, despite learning how to wrench on cars I also started to learn how to cook at a professional level.
I excelled in other aspects in Life, and often worked with Adults in those aforementioned fields as I felt they had much insight to offer, but I was almost entirely useless at wanting to work/hang out with people my own age for the most part as I felt they had little to offer. They often offered nothing I was interested in and I often resorted to car/chef blogs, forums and chatrooms on the Internet, and later on car meet ups, to hang out with actually interesting people after school. In my Junior year I just decided to start going to University lectures instead of my HS classes instead, and while I never made any friends on campus until my Senior year it was still a much better dynamic that suited me way better than what I had been forced into due to my age.