Hacker News Reader

If you define being a kid as "the ability to express emotions and enjoy playing", then yes.

I feel like that's a terrible definition, though.

I think the important point that isn't yet well accepted in our culture is that maturity doesn't happen automatically with age. There are extremely competent, mature, and smart 14 year olds, and there are 29 year olds who haven't emotionally matured yet.

Education is slowly shifting towards "mastery learning" (instead of just taking a test and moving on, you keep practicing a thing until you get better). This is clearly the superior approach and how people learn things anyway (this is how people pick up skills on the job). We will hopefully see a similar shift in maturity, and accept that someone people get very far in life without necessary skills, remove the shame, and help people level up

Mastery learning works great for some subjects but not as well for subjects best learned in groups. If you put 14 year olds and 29 year olds together in the same class then that's likely to be problematic. We can't really state that any one pedagogical is "superior"; the data doesn't support that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com