Is it your impression that the brain isn't an organ that develops from birth and reaches maturity at some point?
https://slate.com/technology/2022/11/brain-development-25-ye...
> When we spoke, I told Steinberg his work had been referenced in this way. “Oh no,” he said, laughing. I then asked whether he had insights about where the figure 25 came from, and he said roughly the same thing as Cohen: There’s consensus among neuroscientists that brain development continues into the 20s, but there’s far from any consensus about any specific age that defines the boundary between adolescence and adulthood. “I honestly don’t know why people picked 25,” he said. “It’s a nice-sounding number? It’s divisible by five?”
> Kate Mills, a developmental neuroscientist at the University of Oregon, was equally puzzled. “This is funny to me—I don’t know why 25,” Mills said. “We’re still not there with research to really say the brain is mature at 25, because we still don’t have a good indication of what maturity even looks like.”
That said the idea that you do most of your growing up before 25, but still do some of it 18-24 should not be controversial. I wouldn’t use that observation to deny education/apprenticeship benefits from anyone though.
Since you're making this political I'd like to point out that it is conservatives that have started a movement to repeal the 26th amendment and raise the voting age.
Substitute “progressive” for “ever increasing” to retain mostly the same meaning intended.
There isn’t some magic age where we suddenly stop screwing up all the time.
In reality, it's just fluctuating. The US's age of majority was 21 until the need for soldiers in WWII drove it to be lowered.
Other cultures have gone even higher.
About the most one could say about 25 is that it's when people's paths start to radically diverge, even amongst the group of people that were previously lumped together as "high achievers." So perhaps the subset of that group who are relatively low-performing — and yet, somehow, high in self-awareness — will wake up and start making changes at 25.